Pony for young, and pony for old: a monologue · 3:25am Aug 6th, 2015
Working in the most heavily-visited store in the locale gives one an opportunity to see and meet tons of people, most of which they'll hate and never want to see the stupid, complaining faces of again.
The rest of the time, these people are treasures. It's the little things. Right, Pinkie?
More often than not, it's the little ones that reach out to me the most. Especially the ones with pony swag :D Ask any young'n with a pony shirt what their favorite pony is, and ninety-nine times out of ten, you'll get a mane six member (or Spike), or occasionally a princess. TO ALL LUNA FANS OUT THERE! YOUR PRINCESS IS LACKING IN THE POPULARITY DEPT. :V Celestia is a big favorite for little girls, and yet, she's seen so little screen time. Nobody wants you, Cadance. And not really much for Twilight, either. Seems the background cast is left out, suspiciously. I figured with a show that has such diverse characters and scenes, that some kid somewhere would attach to Lyra, or the Cakes, Cranky, or Chrysalis. I was wrong, and proven (rightfully) so the other day, when in conversation with a 4 year old, she mentioned, rather disdainfully, that the "wedding episode didn't have any of the mane six in it." She and her sisters agreed: The show needs more M6, less BG characters. To a growing child, who's attached themselves to these six characters plus Spike for years now, trying to thrust new material in is frustrating and hard to process. Suddenly, their comfort is ruined by these...imposters of their heroes! Where are the smooth lines of Rainbow Dash? The Whizz-Bang of Twilight's teleportation? The run-on insanity many young kids go crazy for in Pinkie's every scene? Gone, and hidden behind some new pony nobody cared to make important to them.
What makes this significant, at least to me, is the perspective it puts on how far the show writers and the fandom, as a whole, have changed the original view and intention of the show, all without too drastically changing that core intention, as the young girl's reaction shows. She's loved the show, and all it's done to bring her values and morals for a good life. She hasn't sat back for hours over a pot of coffee wondering just what led to Starlight Glimmer's Communist Regime, what brought Rainbow and Twilight together for the first time, the moments in-between the show, the slices of life that were left behind, and all the paths of life the beloved ponies traveled to come to where they are now: as paragons of the New World. Certainly, she liked the scene where the "music-thing brought all the ponies to the wedding", giving a bit of validity to the BG cast, but not much. The world of Friendship Is Magic exists to tutor and shape young girl's lives to exude their best qualities and be open about themselves, and we, as grown men and women, have become attached to the reliable animation, the interesting background cast, and honorable messages (plus those goddamn scenes where they just won't kiss already!), and the differences have brought about many of the changes in the show that we, as a fandom, have ultimately come to terms with, but exploded over at the release of.
Princess Twilight. STILL a topic of contention with some, the S3 finale brought us a whole slew of troubles for our beloved fanfics and carefully-structured headcanons: the main character becoming a (supposedly immortal(depending on who you ask)) princess, by some gimmicky spell under the ever-watchful eye of Big Brother. What the girl saw: Her idol, working to accomplish the seemingly-impossible, changing the destinies of her friends, and succeeding! :V If that wasn't an esteem boost, I don't know what would be. It inspired many of them to take charge and embrace their potential, I'm sure. It also spawned a marketing boost for Hasbro, and all its pocket-stuffing endeavors. We, as fanfic writers and readers, construct and create entire lives and realities separate from FIM, and yet, similar enough, that we cringe when Dash shows that she hasn't learned a goddamn thing in five seasons, or cry in protest when a BG character is given canon voice and lines that shatter our preconceptions of them. They, as children, see more dolls and lessons for life that they can use every day in class and on the playground in the summer. In the end, both sides are as happy as the other when those credits roll by - for the fraction of a second before we both cry out in rage at the prospect of waiting another whole week!
If everyone's happy with the results, what's the matter with the show?
It seems, that it panders a little too much in our favor.
Case in point: the 100th ep.
So many headcanons explored, so many fanfics denied, and quite a surprising number of them validated :V So many children upset at the lack of P-Twi & Friends. So many choice scenes for juicy fics and ideas to create.. ('Best Friends'), so many scenes lost to the audience below 8. It's a give-and-take that seems to be taking too much from the kids and giving to those of us who've really breathed life into the show. is that unfair? Perhaps. Is it right? Not necessarily, to feature explicitly fandom-created material and call it canon. Is it working? Yes, and spectacularly so. Fandom friends get their juicy scenes and art fuel, and the kids get a different perspective on the lessons they've been learning all these years. Perhaps we could do with a little less focus on LyraBon, and a little less fandering (fandom-pandering), but altogether, the show is still being loved by young and old. Some fandom members have kids that've been bitten by the MLP bug, and others have journeyed here by choice. Whether you come for the friendships, the conflicts, or the headcanon fuel, one thing is for certain:
We could all use a little pony in our lives, be we 5 or 35. And whether or not the show focuses on the main six, we'll keep coming back on the release days to feed our eyeballs with the adorable art, and fill our hearts with tales of pastel-colored talking horses and their adventures. Somewhere inside all of us, a little spark of that friendship remains, and that's incredible.
They say friendship is magic, and, judging by the tingle in my soul as I write this, I suspect the show writers had something more than a dartboard and sticky notes to help them with a name.
Good night, guys, and happy thinking.
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Sir, you have given me something truly to think about.
Thank you
Yeah, the Celestia crap's by far the most popular with the target audience. You'll note that there's a surprising amount of pony merch with her on it. Why? Hell if I know. Kids' paths of logic are impenetrable to the adult.
However, you go on a lot about "Pony" as a concept. And sure, maybe all of us do need a cheerful story with simple, colorful characters (in both senses) solving a problem in twenty-three minutes or less. But here's the thing:
My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is not that good of a show.
Honestly, how many people out there still watch it with the fervor we did when we were first introduced? I jumped on the bandwagon toward the end of 2012, right before the show's surprising demographics became widely known. I enjoyed it. I enjoyed having friends who also enjoyed it that I could talk about with. I enjoyed the fact that it was a G-rated show that wasn't asinine or puritanically "clean".
But the more I look back, the more I realize that the show had little to offer to begin with, and has even less now. I mean, let's face it, as much as we lick Lauren Faust's boots, she didn't create much. It's a show about bouncy, colorful cartoon characters doing bouncy, colorful cartoon character things. And that's the critical thing there: "cartoon character." Not "deep character." Not "character that makes you think about them." Not even "interesting character." The main characters of the show, and the semi-important recurring ones like Celestia? They're complete one-dimensional objects who serve a particular role in the setting, and that's it. Did you ever feel conflicted about a choice made in the show? Was the motivation of a character ever really examined or brought into question? Did it, and this is the most critical thing for a work in any medium, make you think?
Honestly, I can say with certainty that it didn't. Sure, we all thought about the world, examined the characters as we saw them (and inadvertently built a great deal of personality structure that had no real person to support it), and wrote fanfiction about how Rainbow Dash is obviously a lesbian, because come on, guys, rainbow hair.
But we never got asked a tough question. The show never had a moment of moral ambiguity. Hell, given what we've seen of it, the only choices a character in the show gets are "exemplar of Friendship and all-around general uninteresting goodness" or "utter bastard for no real reason other than the former category needs an enemy." Look at the main cast: six ponies that supposedly exemplify a virtue that somehow makes them more powerful than Jesus. One's a stereotypical nerd who loves books (well, used to, anyway, but that got traded in for a set of wings and even less personality) and spouts exposition. One's a stereotypical jock who is super competitive. One's a prissy bitch. One's stubborn as hell and a general idiot. One's antisocial. One's a member of the Robin Williams school of funny (that's like the online diploma of comedy degrees).
That's not good character writing. That's a set of single traits. One-trick ponies, if you will, and you best damn believe they've only got one trick because that is all they ever do. They see a problem, they argue about it a bit, they figure out the obvious solution to the problem, roll credits. No drama. No hard choices. Nothing to think about. The fact of the matter is that we as a whole have decided that a thoroughly mediocre show with blatant, Aesopian morals engineered for inoffensiveness was something worth worshipping like it was Thor's balls themselves, and that's kind disappointing.
But here's where it gets big fast: We saw this, and for whatever reason it struck a chord. The show didn't make us ask questions, but we asked them anyway, in ways the original writers could never have predicted. And when we answered those questions, hot damn did the universe get a lot more interesting. Relentless what-if scenarios forcibly developed character where there wasn't anything of note before. We built a massive, all-consuming multiple-heads-canon about something thoroughly mediocre and managed to create a little bit of awesome while doing it. Add a collective skill and fascination with this new environment by the first talented authors to create it, and we got some amazing stuff. We got inane garbage too, and there was always much more of it than there ever was of the good shit, but the good shit was why we kept going back anyway.
But now we've come full-circle again. We've stopped asking questions and building off unexpected answers. Now we all sit on our asses and mindlessly upvote whatever garbage hits the feature box. The minds that made MLP an awesome thing have all left. THose that remain rarely write anything any more. The site is clogged with endless mediocre sequels to already-mediocre stories. The formulaic fanfiction fuckery that is the LoHAV (also known by its less stigmatized name, the "Displaced" fic) has overtaken the whole thing, with what amounts to the same story with certain select details being changed being uploaded many times a day.
The fandom's not anything like the pioneering fascination with a new environment that categorized the ones who came first, and everything about us has suffered for it. Count the number of idiots with a generic pony-creator avatar you see mindlessly commenting on how good this new Fallout: Equestria sidefic is. Observe the upvote-to-read ratio on a LoHAV. Watch the site rules become more and more restrictive in a futile attempt to curb the incoherent tirades of the ones who've gotten sick of it all. Check the "last update" time on all the still-incompleted stories that first drew you here years ago.
But even with all the shit flying over your head, remember what it was like before all this, and know that you, with every original story you write that asks the questions with the hard answers, with every character who defies the Gary Stu mold, and with every word intended to shut down the sycophantic squeals of the ones who would accept anything they were given, you take a little bit back. And that's good enough for me.
Very well said.
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I would like to say one thing, however:
Those were tears of joy in my case when Minuette first spoke in "Amending Fences."