Pareidolia · 12:14am Mar 23rd, 2018
I promised some kind of summary post for my Points of Canon series, and since Season 8 is rapidly approaching, I guess I’m running out of time to say whatever it is that I have to say. I will, of course, continue the series, and it’s kind of silly to write any kind of conclusion when it’s so obviously incomplete, that I’m in a middle of a season.
Especially the unkind words. So here they are, right off the bat, for that brief period while it is complete.
All of this, I have said before. All of this, I will say again. Let’s start with the TLDR:
- The show crew has no central direction to speak of.
- The show crew has nothing approaching a proper show bible, writers are dropped off the deep end and nobody even notices when they sink. Writers aren’t even encouraged to discuss the series between themselves. Fundamental things about the world are dismissed as immaterial and no consensus about them exists.
- The show crew as a whole does not care about continuity in principle, even when certain individual writers do.
- These people serve further uncaring masters, who have even less of an idea of who is watching ponies and why. What they do have is toy sales figures, which are actually less connected to the show than they think.
- That the final product is any good – when it is – cannot be attributed to the competence of the show crew as a team, but is primarily the result of fortuitous circumstances outside their knowledge or control, as well as occasional fits of genius on par of specific individuals, many of which never even get credited. Many of such fits remain unrecognized and unexploited.
Yes, this also concerns Lauren Faust and the period she has been at the reins, despite the bardolatry, but this remained under every editor they had since, with varying degrees. See Figure 1. Larson is actually the least guilty in that regard – at least he made an effort.
Figure 1.
This is a scan from “The Art of Equestria.” Pay special attention to the quote from Jim Miller, and compare it to the images presented on the very same page. Zoom in. The prosecution has nothing to add.
This much, I have been saying for a long time. This isn’t really what I want to discuss today. Today, I want to talk about divergence. Specifically, about certain events and additions that caused the prevailing fanons to diverge from canon so strongly, that for so many people, my notes turn out to be a surprise.
Have you ever heard of the Mandela Effect? It’s quite relevant here. It’s when you, as well as numerous other people, definitely remember – occasionally, with extra detail – something which, upon investigation, turns out to have never happened or existed. It’s like an alternate reality seeping in through the cracks in public consciousness.
A very similar phenomenon is taking place here: Fandom remembers and dearly loves things about the show that the show never actually contained, and sternly ignores things it actually did contain.
Let’s list a few of these divergences.
Luna
People who remember my post about the leaked show bible will remember one important takeaway from this very strange document:
At the time it was assembled, Pinkie Pie was an earth pony, Fluttershy was a pegasus, but Twilight Sparkle is still Twilight Twinkle. Multiple episode blurbs match the episodes that were actually subsequently filmed exactly. At the same time, there is no whiff of Nightmare Moon or Luna anywhere within the document. A large amount of development work has been done by that point, many Flash assets are present in the book – but the things that defined the show for us, the opening two-parter, the Elements of Harmony, the high fantasy aspect of the show that sets the stage for everything else, all of that is entirely absent.
“Queen Celestia” is not a character at that point, she is a plot device, there to dispense missions and occasional summarizing piece of wisdom. She is not there to tantalize our imagination regarding eternity, patience, suffering, none of that high drama is a thing. It’s Luna-as-Nightmare that makes them all a reality. Without her relationship to Luna, Celestia could be replaced by Charlie, commanding his Angels over a loudspeaker. In fact, in many an episode, she is.
But immediately after the season opening, everything suddenly vanishes, that relationship included: The Mane 6 are not treated as national heroes who saved the world, even in situations where they, in theory, should have been. Luna is nowhere to be seen, and does not reappear all the way until Season 2. The Elements themselves vanish, and do not reappear until Season 2 either.
At some uncertain point, fairly late in the production cycle for Season 1, someone – presumably, Faust, but to be honest, I am not certain on that – had one genius idea: Move the season finale to season opener. Reconstruct it as an episode that arranges all the worldbuilding in a beautiful lattice that we saw. Make it as epic as the budget permits. Get Celestia a lunar sister.
1. By the time we actually see the “evil committed by Nightmare Moon,” it’s limited to property damage in an empty castle.
This was what made Generation 4 a show profoundly different from prior ones, and this was also, incidentally, a success neither properly recognized, nor even acknowledged: while that was done, it did not reflect in writing all the other episodes for the season, or even, most of the subsequent ones. To this day, canon is not entirely clear on what is it that was Luna’s actual crime.1 In fact, writers have hardly stopped to think of the potential implications at all, up until changes in show crew brought on board people who had a chance to form their own opinions from what had been actually aired up to this point, instead of working, essentially, blind.
2. Except shipping. But fans always think of shipping.
Fans, however, hardly thought of anything else.2 Numerous things grow from this divergence: The notion of the Night Court, the popularity of thestrals, the constantly repeated ideas of Nightmare Moon Cults, the near-deity status of alicorns, to name but a few. Most of them, canon-as-written does not actually support.
In fact, canon remains largely unsure of how to use Celestia and Luna as actual characters, even as late as Season 7.
The Globe
3. And bitingly sarcastic.
In the immortal3 words of Andrzej Sapkowski, making a proper fantasy world is a work that requires effort, which is not actually required: Making a map and pretending you did is sufficient. The cosmology of Equestria described in Episode 1 is most consistent with some manner of flat Earth and a Celestial Sphere: Sun and Moon require to be moved. The show bible does not detail how in any way, and neither does the show.
Figure 2.
4. One word: Cows.
Because canon does not think this issue important. Canon does not even believe that a map is important. The first map turned up midway through Season 2. Geography was clearly never a part of world design for Generation 4. Whether Equestria even has any borders was never thought important, it was a magical land, a Paradise Estate. For the longest time, it remained entirely unclear just where do griffons come from, and what kind of people they are, and fanon rushed to populate the world – already presented as containing numerous sapients – with details which canon deliberately avoided.4
Many a clever story was written touching on the subject of how international relations would be affected by ponies being the sapient species in control of the sun. By My Little Pony The Movie, we find out that there’s a solid possibility that nobody else was even aware that they are.
At the same time, globes appeared in the series as early as Call of the Cutie. Fanon will occasionally dismiss the idea that pony Earth is spherical even now.
Which neatly flows into the next one…
Color versus Nature
I direct you once again to this quote from the show bible:
But what sets My Little Pony apart from all other ’tween properties is that all these experiences have a FANTASICAL twist, and clever “pony” theme behind all of it. (For instance, if we were to tell a story about a sports competition, we would not have the pony’s play soccer, but polo, or rodeo, or a jumping competition. If we wanted to tell a story about a dance recital, it would be a dressage recital. All the feelings and experiences would be that of a little girl, it is only the details that would be pony.)
That document persists in stating that on multiple occasions: Ponies are at best the color of the world, rather than its nature. Pony experiences are no more than a metaphor for human experiences. Ponies are to be humans in rubber masks.
Most of the time, that’s an attitude canon tries to keep.
However, even the show bible diverges from itself on this, presenting cutie marks – one of the defining attributes of pony experience, for which a human counterpart does not, and strictly speaking, cannot exist – as the core plot point of an episode. Fanon runs away much further in this direction:
- The mechanics of pony hooves remain nebulous throughout canon, but the more it goes on, the more capable they become. Fanon, instead, spends a lot of time trying to work out how would a civilization for which finer manipulation of objects is only accessible to a third of all the population actually work. The Sandwich Problem is a problem for fanon, but canon dismisses it entirely: It’s axiomatic that ponies have sandwiches because humans have sandwiches, who cares about why.
5. I.e. the observed male/female ratio that is actually caused by selection bias.
Canon stringently avoids the mention of anything sexual wherever possible, for obvious reasons, but it’s pretty clear that ponies do not, for example, have a seasonal estrous cycle: Birthdays are all over the place. Fanon, however, puts pony physiology front and center, and not just for fetish reasons, but with a completely straight face. And in fanon interpretations, ponies lean towards horses more than they lean towards humans, with assumptions of 11-month gestation, occasional ideas about “horse years,” and explanations of girls school effect5 rooted in this or that physiological quirk.
This list could be extended, these are just the more glaring examples. Fanon seeks to extrapolate differences in physiology onto differences in society and psychology of individual, and considers these issues a major topic of discussion. Many flame wars have been waged over the concept of herds, for example.
This divergence is the start of numerous others, as well, most of them societal. Following the high fantasy elements provided by Episode 1, fanon runs off into imagining a near-medieval structure for Equestria. This is not a direction canon considers at all – for canon, what is outside the margins is typically thought to be much closer to how a child would describe modern USA, and little details like bar codes on fashion magazines keep slipping in.
But perhaps the most important part of this divergence is that right off the bat, fanon started treating ponies as adults they actually were presented as, while canon took a long time to settle on just what level of emotional maturity ponies actually have.
Conclusion
Figure 3. Figure out what it means yourself.
This list could be continued, but listing every divergence is hardly the point of this post either. The point is this interesting statement:
The divergent ideas that spawn fanons are obvious to fans, even though the show crew remains stubbornly unaware of most of them – they only leak in over a period of years, as the crew gets replaced, at best. Throughout the history of pony fandom, they have been independently rediscovered numerous times.
There is something common that gives birth to them. That something, however, is most definitely not the show itself.
6. “Why We Read Fiction: Theory of Mind and the Novel” is a very interesting book.
Both writing and reading are creative processes, but they are creative in very different ways. While there is little I have to say on writing, the most important creative processes in reading have to do with applying and refining a theory of mind.6 Reading revolves around divining the states of mind of characters from subtle clues of their speech, body language, narrative, which is inherently a creative process, for the simple reason that a writer may have thought something else entirely. Especially in cases where there is no singular writer, like in the case we’re investigating here, and even the written word passes through the hands and minds of many people before it arrives on our screens. Every episode script introduces a different Luna, sometimes subtly, on occasion, profoundly. But in the eyes of fandom, they coalesce into a singular truth, which is, perhaps, truer than any single writer’s vision, because it is free to ignore pieces which don’t fit.
I remember many a story on Fimfiction which waxes poetic, trying to discuss what the very existence of “My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic” means in the context of the spiritual makeup of humanity. Some make this their primary theme, others just touch a little on it, but relatively few of those that put ponies and humanity in any kind of serious joint context escape it.
7. Few exceptions notwithstanding.
There’s also another thing I remember about all of them: That’s not the actual show itself they are referencing, but the show behind the eyes of its viewers. The show itself, as it is, is a messy collection of stuff thrown at the wall to see what sticks, buried behind other stuff. It is not a coherent narrative by any margin. While a single episode typically has narrative intent, they do not form a chord, let alone a symphony.7
Essentially, when you’re writing about that, it’s not the creativity that went into making the show that you’re studying as reflective of humanity. It’s the creativity that went into watching it.
Why was it this show, and not some other one, that gave rise to this? I don’t know. But I have a hunch that this is the biggest accident in the entire thing, one lucky hit, that a next generation will not be able to replicate, because it was neither recognized nor acknowledged: Hitting that demand for a hopeful fantasy.
Hitting it with something that was actually nothing like what was required, but was just close enough, and just vague enough, to permit a reading that did fit. The reading that lives on, divorced from the original writing, and might well outlive it.
Remember that next time. Generation 4 will one day be gone. People will shuffle off into other fandoms, or out of them entirely. Something will remain with them, however, and that something is not the product of Lauren Faust, or Mitchell Aaron Larson, or Meghan McCarthy, or Jim Miller, or Josh Haber.
It’s authorless, ephemeral, void. It is important, because it really is reflective of someone, even when it isn’t reflective of the humanity at large.
It’s in you, too.
And in the end, we were Faust all along. Or something like that.
I enjoyed your analysis. Nice work.
I have to wonder how much different in nature the stories and other art created so far might have been if there had been a strict canon for the show. Would there have been as much room to grow? People's art would likely have diverged significantly from canon, anyway, but there's so much head-canon here that's good (as well as bad). If the show itself actually had a clever, enticing canon laid out, it makes me wonder now if the show would have kept it's current popularity among the brony fan-base.
Good post.
This is a great summary on my thoughts on canon and fanon regarding the show. Many a fanfic (Aporia included) have produced something much more enjoyable to get into because there is consistency behind what we see, rather than making it up as you go along canon wise, outside of individual episodes. Pining for a Hopeful Fantasy indeed, when fantasy normally is almost always associated with conflict and a primitive society in technology, culture, and morals. If magic exists there, it exists for bad reasons, and never in a mundane way (for mundane magic use implies video game mechanics).
Good post. I can't object; your essays, combined with season after season, have driven home again and again that the show has no consistent worldbuilding.
I think this's one of the things which prompts so many fans to say after each season the show's jumped the shark: it keeps contradicting prevailing fanons in favor of something worse and less interesting, because the writers never thought about it. Sometimes they get it right and make the world more interesting, like with Twilight's ascension - but usually not, like with the Pillars.
It seems to me that stuff being bad in the way pony is bad is the only reason I get interested in fan works at all. I know this isn't true for everyone, but I can count on one hand the properties I've cared enough about to, like, read fanfiction about. I'm satisfied by most stories, even if in my satisfaction I still wish there was more to read/watch. I recently ran into this discrepency when I finished watching Death Note and felt the urge to read fanfiction about an anime for, quite possibly, the first time.
I've noted before that it seems like properties that draw the biggest -- and especially most creative -- fan communities are often... not the best. Look at Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek, Twilight. All of them have world building that hints at just enough interesting stuff, and in each of those cases, if you really look at them, they do that because if you tried to fill in the gaps none of it makes a bit of sense.
Which is not to say any of them are bad. They (along with MLP) are enjoyable in a pretty basic way, and they have enough there to tell the stories they want to tell. But there's some magic recipe for acquiring a fandom that requires a very specific balance of genius and laziness (or something like it) built into the work.
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I don’t know. However, I do have some thoughts.
It is my long-standing observation that the biggest – most rabid, even – fandoms grow from stories which are inherently incomplete or otherwise broken. In an almost Buddhist fashion, a perfect story escapes the circle of samsara, while an imperfect one remains, accumulating interpretations, because if a story is actually perfect, there is, by definition, nothing to add to it. Harry Potter is the prime example here: It is authored by a single author, who, nevertheless, can’t keep her world straight. It’s also one of the strongest fandoms in decades. There clearly is some merit in imperfection.
It is evidently possible to achieve this deliberately: The rich lore of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and other From Software games is intentionally full of blank spots, and after spending a considerable time investigating it, I am convinced that at least some important holes aren’t just “intentionally left blank”, but never actually had anything in them. Lore speculation is what the players of all these notoriously difficult games do when they get stuck, it produces a huge amount of WMG.
However, this observation is incomplete: One of the other strongest fandoms I know is the Lord of the Rings fandom, which existed for decades, waxing and waning, but never disappearing, movies or no movies, games or no games, and one thing I wouldn’t call Lord of the Rings is incomplete. Clearly, there’s something more interesting going on.
Metaphors of buckshot hitting a pinhole versus a bullet come to mind.
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I've heard this said of Harry Potter before, but I never really thought about it all that much since I first read the books back in my teen years. What are the common criticisms of the series in regards to its world-building?
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It might be instructive to look at the first recognizably modern fandom: that of the Sherlock Holmes stories. The setting of those stories is not obviously fantastical, but pick enough at it and you'll notice that London doesn't map to London, the trains run at odd times, stories that appear to refer to other stories must have happened before the stories to which they refer, Watson may have had as many as four wives despite only being married once, and so on. I own a positive cinderblock of a book that tries mightily to collect the whole canon into a timeline and a narrative, and while one must applaud the effort, it's clearly a fool's project.
Despite this, as I've said, the stories attracted the first recognizably modern fandom, complete with international appreciation societies, self-published fan-fiction, and (successfully, because they got to his mother) hounding the author for more content even after he'd given up on the whole affair and put on the most definitive bow he could. What's going on here?
Hecky if I know.
Say, uh, how do you format those side footnotes?
As something of a worldbuilding geek, I can’t help but agree - especially as I go through the process of worldbuilding sufficient to support the Advancedverse, something that is at least as dependent on fanon as canon, if not more. (And if I haven’t said it before, thanks for this series, which has been a most useful reference, even for which bits of canon I’ll be quietly overwriting.)
Heck, it’s needed enough of it that I could spin off my very own primary ‘verse’s Planet of the Tiny Sapient Ungulates...
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Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the Harry Potter books, and the setting that's there is a big part of that (and is evocative and usually well done.) Rowling is good at using details to suggest a fantastical world with cool, unexpected things.
But she tends to fall down on both the large scale (every Prime Minister of Britian has known about the wizarding world and they're still secret? And has allowed all the the skeevy shit wizards and other creatures have pulled on muggles? Not to mention generations of muggle born witches and wizards keeping the secret, all over the world, despite magic being able to heal broken bones in an afternoon and stuff. Or, another example, there seem to be enough wizarding kids in the British Isles to fill Hogwarts, but she's only implied one or two schools for all of North America and the rest of Europe) and on making those awesome, intriguing details make sense (for example, the spell casting tech that made the Marauder's Map should, perhaps, be used more often than by some hooligans for pranks? Like, for security at places like the Ministry of Magic, to prevent death eaters and teenagers from sneaking into the super secret parts of the building to stage a destructive battle?)
It's a pretty common pitfall with high magic or far future tech settings where it's easy to see how the magic or tech fits into your story, but it takes a ton of work to really consider how it changes the world both on a societal level and in day to day life. Rowling didn't put in much of that work, which doesn't hurt the story at all and leaves a lot of gaps for fans to work in different directions.
4822925
My husband is in LotR fandom, and he says their fanfic writers are really big on the Silmarillion, where big chunks of Elven history are brushed over in a line or two ("<Elf 1> married <Elf two> and begat <Important Elf>".) Fan writers will take those details and go to work.
There's also a ton of fandom there dedicated to scholarly analysis that Tolkien obviously supported; the mythologies, languages, and cultures that went into it and how they're portrayed in context, etc. LotR fandom has an academic component that most fandoms imitate, but is a lot deeper there thanks to Tolkien's obsessions.
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See also: Milton and Dante for Genesis.
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Well, the less said about God's world building, the better.
It explains why Hasbro never tried to monetize older fan-base. I don't know how it in other countries but in Russia people often pay pretty big sums of money for hand-made pony stuff. Figurines and plushies sometime sell for hundreds of dollars and people still pay for it.
So it always boggles my why Hasbro never tried to get at least a piece of that pie.
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I have moderately advanced software to transmute Markdown into FimFiction BBCode. For some strange reason, hardly anybody else seems to be interested.
The particular formatting for sidenotes is like this:
You can see why this would be annoying to write out by hand, which is why I don’t.
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I suspect that, for a series to inspire fanfiction and a larger fandom, it should both leave the audience wanting more, and make it look easy to fill that gap.
Both of those are affected by the sort of story you’re telling and by the quality of the writing. You can leave the fans wanting more by implying (and never showing) a larger universe where other interesting stories are happening—or by including enough narrative missteps to inspire your audience to fix them. You can make it look easy by including lots of space an aspiring fanficcer could fill without contradicting canon, especially if it includes an easy template for people to invent OCs and insert them into the universe—or by writing in an easy-to-imitate style, one that inspires more readers to say, “Yeah, I can write as good as this. Maybe even better.”
About a decade ago, I was neck-deep in the fandom for the webcomic Gunnerkrigg Court. But in spite of how much time I spent discussing each new page on the official forum and forming elaborate theories to explain everything, I didn’t write any fanfics, nor was I interested in reading anyone else’s. You see, there were quite a few times when I (and the rest of the fandom) expected Gunnerkrigg’s plot to go one way, but it instead swerved in a different direction—a narratively interesting direction that, in retrospect, had been foreshadowed all along. We were all just too blind to see it. After the third or fourth time this happened, I realized that Tom Siddell (the author) knew what I wanted to read, even better than I (or anyone else in the audience) did. And that immediately discouraged me from trying to write anything with his characters—and killed my interest in other fans’ attempts.
Now, let me tell you about Homestuck. I got into that webcomic a few years later, and it’s what convinced me to write my first proper fanfic. Not because I liked Homestuck better (I still counted Gunnerkrigg as my favorite at the time) but because it’s a breezy narrative with a tendency to introduce flashy, interesting characters, and then abandon them forever a few pages later. One of those characters, The Handmaid, really caught my interest. I needed to know how her story ended—but it seemed that Andrew Hussie (the author) was completely done with her. And because the original comic was written in a style that’s superficially easy to emulate, it gave me the confidence I needed to just write that story myself.
To get back to the original point... I think if MLPFIM did have consistent worldbuilding that gave Tolkien a run for his money, it wouldn’t reduce the total number of fanfics, but it would reduce certain types of fanfics. Slice-of-life fics and romances wouldn’t be affected that much—but the genres built atop extensive fanon would be on much shakier ground. When the actual canon is clear, there’s little need for fanon, after all. The whole category of “headcanon dump” stories would have no reason to exist any more. All our canon-compliant-at-time-of-publication adventures about ponies traveling outside Equestria, or learning a shocking secret about Equestria’s past (including classics like It’s a Dangerous Business Going Out Your Door, Daetrin’s Apotheosis stories, The Celestia Code, and so on) would be very different in order to fit into the show’s rigorous worldbuilding, if they got written at all. Ditto for the vast majority of changeling and griffon stories. And the people who would have written those kinds of stories would instead pour their energy into Alternate Universe fics.
Nice; thank you for writing this.
So, in general, you doubt that Hasbro able to repeats the same amount of success with presumable G5?
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Looking at the leaked emails, even Megan McCarthy doubts, and all the considerations listed above – the way a world should be designed with a backbone – didn’t even turn up on her planning horizon.
Oh, it will be pretty. But I doubt it will be anything beyond that.
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Um... I vaguely remember that some leaked papers suggested that they plan to give G5 actual plot, consistency and lore. But again, maybe I confuse it with something else
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Oof. Yeah that's a noodly mess. Cool to know tho, thanks.
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<offtopic>
I can't speak for everyone, but the formatting of things I intend to publish on Fimfiction generally divides into three camps:
None of those use cases lends themselves to a Markdown translator. Markdown lends itself to structured, informational writing, not to narrative.
</offtopic>
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I see what you mean. In retrospect, a lot of these did occur to me at the time of reading, but I guess I never put much thought into it in my original readings. Makes me wonder what else I might've missed.
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You don’t use enough italics, do you?
You also don’t use enough footnotes. Shame on you!
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4822925 I think we need to distinguish a bit between general "fandom" and "fanfiction writing fandom." Lord of the Rings, as the first mainstream high-fantasy story, has a lot of grandfathered in respect and influence. It's also a setting with probably the least number of plot holes and things left blank around. And it has had a large fandom for years, but has it really had a lot of e fanfiction written for it? I don't think so, and it's for the reasons you described.
LOTR is a bit like a birthday card that's been signed by everyone in the office. Looks great, but you can only fit your signature in the remaining space, not write a large compelling message.
On the other hand, you could make the argument that D&D and half of tabletop roleplaying games are LOTR fanfiction...
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It had outright fanfiction – no serial numbers filed off, no nothing – printed and sold in significant quantities, (100K+ print runs) at least during the 90s, in certain parts of the world.
Ponyfic is, in turn, unusually concentrated for fanfiction, so it skews the picture considerably.
The following isn't necessarily a response, just word vomit from my brain after reading different parts of the post.
I don't really see the contradiction in the Manehattan page. All tech shown in the images of Manehattan is from the early 20th century (1920's and 1930's), and those lights could very well be powered by "magic", which the quoted text states as one of the options.
On the subject of Fanon = Worldbuildy and focused on horse stuff VS Canon = Loose continuity and focused on human stuff... I've always preferred the middle road approach.
If your canon is too loose, you end up with a show like the one we currently have, which while definitely a nice watch, isn't really meant to tell a continuous story or stand up to scrutiny, and yet attempts to do both on a regular basis. I think that it's important to shoot for a "Last Airbender" middle-ground, where episodes can be self-contained while still being strictly tied into a solid, well-thought-out world and narrative. (After all, too much continuity means you get less and less viewership over time due to viewers needing to be caught up to understand episodes.)
If you're too focused on horse stuff, you end up with a world that's interesting to read about on a concept level, but difficult to relate to on a human level (and is confusing as heck if it's a show instead of a book/fic). I think the "humans in pony suits" philosophy is a good rule of thumb so that you don't bog down the viewer/reader with horse facts and inhuman behavior. Although I'm fine with a few deviations from fully being human (such as cutie marks, flight, and magic) to justify the species choice.
I've always found that most "fanon" ideas are over-the-top or silly (in my eyes). Occasionally a really cool fanon thing will happen (speculations about changelings were fun while they lasted), but most fanon was... meh, in my eyes. I'm rarely the type to hold headcanons on flimsy evidence (except my "genderfluid Clover the Clever" headcanon, which is literally just there to explain why her portait is female but his scroll shows him as a dude, and Twilight seems fine with both genders for Clover, which would be a bit uncomfortable if Clover was one or the other... shit I got off track).
Yeah, audience interpretation of a work is massively important, ESPECIALLY in works with no single source. Death of the Author is much more applicable when there is no singular "Author". Hell, it especially applies to G4 of MLP, wherein the writers have little to no communication when writing seasons. The occasional amazing episode is entirely because a writer had a stroke of genius that happened to luckily align with the works of all the other writers. (I think you said something like this earlier.)
I like the bit about taking away our fan interpretation stuff with us even after the show itself dies off. Very poetic.
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The phrase “We know there are no streetlights, for example. If we had streetlights…” explicitly states that the streetlights do not currently exist, when the shot illustrating it plainly shows them.
This could be excused if, for example, Miller said this well before the episode the image is from was finalized. Unfortunately for Miller, while streetlights aren’t common in Equestria, the first streetlights show up in Ponyville as early Season 1. Directly where the streetlights on the original sketches in the “show bible” are, so Generation 4 had streetlights well before a single episode was completed, and in any case, well before Miller ever gave an interview.
I remind you that Jim Miller was the storyboard supervisor for seasons two and three, a storyboard artist for season one, and co-director for season four.
Which is why the quote is so damning.
Have you, perchance, skipped the first post in my blog index? If you did, you might want to read that, too.
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That was a nice read.
As for the lamp thing, that just sounds like he doesn't know offhand what tech existed in the time period, or else that he simply forgot. Not surprising that one of the staff forgot the tech levels, given the shakey technological continuity of Equestria, constantly oscillating between the middle ages and the late 20th century.
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After he had to draw these things multiple times, sign off on other people drawing them multiple times, and direct their work? No, it’s not “simply forgot.”
He merely never thought the issue was in any way important or worth seriously thinking about, and that is how he usually approaches his work. The statement for the interview does not reflect what the crew is actually doing under his direction, and, pardon the presumption, is mostly there to make him look cooler for the interview. Case in point.
Jim Miller is one of the major reasons I have a policy of ignoring whatever the crew says regarding the state of things in Equestria, simply because every time someone asks him such a question, his response normally boils down to “we never thought about it,” when it doesn’t boil down to “it doesn’t matter.”
He’s certainly free to think so.
I have to say, one of the biggest contributions to the rise of the show, was a total lack of originality spreading in Hollywood. With more and more focus being put on formulas that "work" (aka, make tons of $$$), creativity took a nosedive. In a world of reboots, remakes, and unwanted sequals that don't make sense, we created our own creativity.
In the sort of way that D&D works so well, MLP:FiM gave us characters with Anchors™️. The world was halfway fleshed out the same way a list of bulletpoints provides structure, but not nitty-gritty details. While there certainly is a canon to follow, character reactions with one another are extremely difficult to emulate if you don't know the character. The show gives us ample time to become familiar with the characters, which really is all that matters when it comes to writing fanfics. It doesn't matter what location, background story, or event say, Twilight, is in, as we already have a good understanding of how she would react to [crazy story idea here], while still staying true to her as a person.
Thus, MLP fan fiction is extremely accessible and widespread, sort of similar to the same way that memes are.
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Since you mentioned Dante's Inferno and pals, I'll bring up the crucial roles Athena and Hephaestus had in each other's parthenogenesis.
Have to agree. One of the more disgusting examples is Ahuizotle. He was kinda introduced as a VILLAIN. "300 years of unrelenting, sweltering heat". What do writers do? "I just want to protect" bullhonky. Or what about Discord? It's not said that he tortured only because it's a kids show. Howver, his glass window shows him holding ponies over FIRE. and we hear faint SCREAMS. How does a DEVIL, a CONCEPT of WAR does PEACE? He is positioned as anti-harmony.
My decision is simple - "I reject your reality, and substitute my own." Many things, despite being in the show, are simply non-canon for me. I take canon as whatever fits earlier episodes(first come - first served), or whatever I kinda like more. Within reason, of course.
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They put it in Discord's mouth, but it's the closest thing to a guiding principle that their worldbuilding can be said to have: "Sense? What fun is there in making sense?"
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The thing is, even Discord has to make sense, in the meaning of being evil. He might have his own reasons, that are never explain. He might think in fifth dimension, and even there he could be considered insane, among other thinkers in fifth dimension. Writers have to give me a CANON, UNBROKEN canon. Othervise, how woult the world even function Equus is not Discord. They have to have SOME cause-effect, and other logical things. Continuity. Please, give me continuity. Othervise I will simply consider my headcanons as true canons. This is a call to you, and anyone else, who reads my comment. Who is up for rewriting the show? Some of the main points in that instead of Princess Twilight becomes an archmagus, stays as unicorn, Starlight is punished heavily, and some other events are shuffled around.
Postscript for those who have been linked to this blog via G5 content, often by me: this is the "continuity" they had to link to G5. Reasonably speaking, nothing has changed.
A lovely conclusion to an outstanding analysis. Bravó!