Rainbow Power · 11:29pm Jul 8th, 2019
So I'm watching this season of a cartoon. The six main characters each get their own individual episode where they must face a difficult decision, and find inner growth. At the end of each episode, they get their own magical glowing trinket to symbolize this character development. Once all six have their trinket, a major bad guy appears, and it turns out those trinkets are used together to unlock a super power up so they can unleash a brand new magical attack to easily defeat the villain.
Yes the big twist here is this isn't My Little Pony season 4 with the friendship box and Tirek. It's KiraKira PreCure a la Mode, where none of the magical girls are ponies (well, actually one....)
It's a really common Magical Girl genre trope, not an intentional similarity, but there's so many amusing similarities between MLP and PreCure. They're shows for little girls, made primarily to advertise toys, and unexpectedly gained a following outside of the target demographic. I guess I'm a fan now too.
I do like MLP season 4's plot, it was pretty good. It's still impressive that "Pinkie Pride" got Weird Al as a guest. I actually like the Rainow Power designs. I don't like Tirek much, though. Sure he's a badass apocalyptic 80s villain from the original show, but that's why I think he doesn't fit the tone of the modern show at all. Personal opinions.
But now I guess seeing the same plot done several times in anime makes me realize that MLP was still pretty weak at it. One example is the pacing. MLP scattered those important episodes throughout the season, and it was kind of a surprise to notice they were thematically linked together. Kind of like the 1st season that had a surprise ongoing plot with the Gala. But I think the major flaw here is that, uh, every episode of MLP is supposed to be about friendship lessons and growth. ALL of season 4 are the same types of episodes about the Mane 6 (except a few about the CMC), and it's just that these lessons are considered more important, rewarding them with a sparkling rainbow trinket.
PreCure almost seems perfunctory about pacing this, ordering all 6 character growth episodes in a row. Any kid could notice the pattern instantly. Yet it totally worked to hook my attention, I was super excited to see the next character's episode. I know there's differences in the shows' schedules, PreCure can't afford to wait until a season finale.... but maybe that's a good thing, that it didn't drag things out and waste my time. And spreading out these slice-of-life climaxes in the middle of an already slice-of-life show seems so cluttered. I complained about this last time, with how Thundercats has constant character growth to the point where everything blurs together as important moments, rather than a rhythm of highs and lows.
Another reason PreCure maybe did it better: the power-up lasts longer. Once they get the new magical attack, you know they're going to use it every single episode from now on. This might seem shallow, because there's an obvious corporate reason to re-use it so much: it's advertising a new toy product! And PreCure is much, much less subtle about the toy placement than MLP ever was (cheap plastic-looking 3D models). But MLP might actually be dumber about handling it, because the Rainbow Power immediately taken away so the characters can return to the status quo. As a writer, if you give your characters a reward, let them enjoy it for a little while! If they only use it once, then yeah it will certainly feel like a cheap deus ex machina rather than a cool power-up! Don't worry ponies, you're rewarded with a NEW mystery to solve, the Cutie Map! to this day nobody can explain what the purpose of that map was, but that's not my point. Even in a silly fantasy genre for kids, character growth and magical power-ups are linked to each other, and you should be able to point to the differences before and afterward. Even though PreCure's sometimes shallow about development, at least it's competent at showing it.
I think the first two seasons of MLP had this unique identity that couldn't be found anywhere else. Then it became afraid of growing stale, and started borrowing from other shows and genres, like this whole magical girl plot from s4. Even though there's so much of seasons 3-5 that I loved a lot, I feel that it became a weaker imitation of other cartoons and anime. New thematic elements get welded on, and the show has to keep cannibalising more identities to keep growing and not collapse. Now by season 9 it's just too much happening at the same time. Too many characters, too many themes, too many plots. You have to let go of old things to make room for the new, and MLP was afraid of changing. It's been 4 years since the CMC got their cutie marks, for example, and they're still doing the same things.
Even though I complained about Equestria Girls, and still not much a fan of it, I do gotta admit that it has some freedom to form its own identity. It has its own reasons to appeal to its own audience, and that works so much better than, say, the way MLP introduced the student 6 while giving them such a tiny slice of the seasonal pie.
A few years I (jokingly) thought it'd be a good idea to do what Skins does, where every 2 seasons the characters graduate and move forward in life, replaced by an entirely new cast. Of course that's complete apples to oranges, totally different types of shows. It just wouldn't work, so I didn't take the idea too seriously. But I was surprised that PreCure does exactly that same cycle of rebirth. Each season runs for a year, tells its story through 49 episodes (plus an hour-long theatrical movie), and THAT'S IT. The next year introduces a new cast of characters, new animation style, new stories & themes, new director & writer (and new toy designs, naturally).
Some PreCure seasons are better written than the others. Some seasons sell toys better than the others. But this process is actually interesting in how much it allows the show to experiment, and stretch its own boundaries, of what appears to be a rigidly-defined genre with commercial interests. It allows itself to try new things.
I guess this is kind of what was seen with the rumors and leaks of MLP gen 5. New designs, new setting and story, okay that's fair enough. But they can't let go of the Mane 6, because those characters have been so successful. Even if they change aspects of their identity and personality, which might alienate some existing fans, they gotta keep these names and trademarks. MLP has become too big to fail, and Hasbro is deathly afraid of failure. Just like Disney and Marvel, which recycle the same successful characters for decades and decades without ever allowing them to change or be replaced. It's unhealthy.
I watch a lot of other shows too. PreCure is just for my daily dose of optimism and positivity, which was what originally got me hooked on MLP. Funny how MLP doesn't seem optimistic at all anymore, just nostalgic and anxious over its own approaching death. 
Huh. Will check it out. Which season or episode(s) should I start with?
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oof, there's 16 seasons and I've only seen a few. I have no idea! whichever looks the coolest?
if you only watch one season, then "HeartCatch" has the best writing, and is the most popular. though I've heard "Go! Princess" is really good too.
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The anime subreddit has a compelling and useful PreCure primer.
I really ought to go back to Princess PreCure, I watched the first two episodes back in winter and then went on hiatus because it sort of gave me a headache? But it deserves a second chance.
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Thanks, amigos!
I see where you're coming from, but even though Season Four didn't execute it that well, I still give it credit for at least trying to introduce a season-long story arc. It was a fresh change of pace, especially welcome after Season Three.
You could argue that the first season had a couple (Twilight staying in Ponyville to learn more about friendship, and the ponies preparing for the Gala), but the former felt more like base premise than ongoing arc, and the latter only really impinged on maybe three episodes overall.
Besides, I'm probably more kindly disposed to Season Four's arc for blending in with the general slice-of-life format. After all, that's where I think the show's at its best. Yeah, some people go nuts over the adventurous two-parters, but I rarely find them to be much more than interesting genre shifts, certainly not the main draw.
I don't know about the comparison to PreCure, but to me, the weakest aspect of the ongoing arc was how it handled Twilight's princesshood. Cards on the table: I didn't like the way Twilight became a princess in Season Three (that she became a princess at all I didn't mind too much). Not least of all because it once again smacked of "Twilight is Special", which does her friends a disservice and always does a lot to reduce the character's appeal in my eyes.
Most of what made Season Four good for me was that, outside of a handful of episodes, it mostly just ignored that aspect too. Except, conspicuously, when it came to the two-parters. Granted, it's helpful from a world-building perspective to see how a Princess would handle Equestria's Royal Guards and so on, but honestly when she's "Princess of Friendship", the future role's not much more mysterious than "Rainbow Power" or the Cutie Mark Crusaders getting their marks; they're still fundamentally going to be doing their schtick in future, so Twilight's worries about her purpose just feel hollow to me.
(Incidentally, I quite like Tirek as a villain, especially the fact that he finally catalyses Discord's reform to send it going in the right direction. What I don't like is how, in order for him to be a dramatic threat at the end, Celestia has to make so many foolish decisions and basically enable his soul-sucking spree. It's hard to cheer for a climax when you keep thinking Damn it, we could have easily avoided this.)
In short, I think you've got a point. The show's in this odd place where it wants to do new stuff and change the old stuff, but it really doesn't seem to know how to balance either. The Cutie Mark Crusaders were a reliable ongoing element up until Season Five, and then the expected change happened, and... well, what really changed except that they suddenly felt less relevant thereafter? Heck, Diamond Tiara basically dropped off the face of the Earth after having her one and only major purpose removed.
Season Five pretty much mishandled Discord post-reform - mostly by pretending that he's a good guy after Season Four's finale, instead of actually building on a need for him to seriously atone, since his one good deed there was fixing an apocalyptic mess he knowingly and happily enabled in the first place - Season Six mishandled Starlight, Season Seven didn't even come up to bat for the Pillars...
They so obviously want to do new stuff, and then when they do it's just sort of there, banging elbows with everything else or quietly being ignored for long stretches.
Re: your broader point about mishandling change and nostalgia, I've always wondered if the show would be stronger by resetting every season. A case in point is another franchise I like: Digimon.
With one or two exceptions, every season of Digimon was set in a new continuity with new characters and new adventures. The only major constants were that it had to involve the eponymous Digimon (digital monsters), a core set of human characters would be pitted against some catastrophically ambitious enemy, and the bond between the Digimon and the humans was central to helping them grow stronger and defeat increasingly dangerous opponents. Everything else - evolution mechanics, the way the bond worked, how the human and digital worlds interacted, what themes were involved, whether it leaned more on sci-fi or fantasy - could differ.
Sometimes it worked out great, sometimes it flopped, but what I liked about it was that it allowed room for experimentation without being beholden to the previous season. For instance, the first season treated the digital world more as a sort of fantasy wonderland under threat from pure evil, and each human character had a characteristic virtue which helped their partner Digimon to grow stronger.
The second season was a sequel to it but changed the cast, focusing more on comedy, adding alternative forms of evolution, and introducing into the mix human antagonists with more sympathetic backstories and motives (heck, one of them joins the heroes halfway through).
Then the third season went for more of a cynical cyberpunk interpretation and put a lot of stock on the digital world's origins and the programmers who made them in the first place. It also pushed the envelope the furthest with what a "kid's show" could do, including some of the best Digimon characters who had their own arcs and motivations independent of the human characters.
The fourth had the humans become the Digimon, with most of the focus being on how they interacted with and protected the world itself, and included some Judeo-Christian symbolism in its world-building and history.
The fifth focused more on overall relations between the two worlds, kind of like a border security, had a far more aggressively machismo outlook, and had arguably the series' most vile human antagonist of all.
And the sixth (mostly) did away with the level-up mechanic, as in previous installments, set the whole thing in a global war up front, and made it so that multiple Digimon could combine with each other in several ways to get stronger instead of evolving, which puts a premium on gaining allies and maintaining cooperation.
Friendship is Magic tries something new every season, and it does it so often that I've wondered if it'd just be better to cut all continuity losses and reset the world once a season. Since the writers rotate every season too, it'd give them their own sandbox to play around in, and fans don't get inconvenienced by big sweeping changes to the lore because, whatever happens, their favourite seasons are largely left untouched.
Granted, this does come at the cost of resetting the cast and other favourite aspects every season so that there's less of an ongoing enjoyment watching them, but if you're going to risk screwing them up anyway, I think it's outweighed by the advantages of starting anew.
That's why I'm a little more optimistic about Generation 5 than most people are, because frankly I think it's about damn time. Most of my annoyance with the more recent seasons of the current generation boils down to "stop screwing with the canon already".
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I didn't know Digimon did that. That explains why every time I heard about the show, it seemed to be a completely different story, and I thought I was misunderstanding everything.
On MLP's season 1, it's not exactly the plot arc that impresses me, since it's only 3 episodes. I'm not even sure if this should be called an arc, or some other term entirely, but it's a slow cumulative effect of learning about the characters through all the unconnected episodes in between, which makes it more enjoyable than if those Gala episodes were shown together in a row, like a 3-parter. I guess it's not an arc at all; it's not the way "they" teach how stories should be written. There's a lot of bad slice-of-life anime, but the good ones feel pretty similar to this humble pace, where even the "filler" feels valuable to the climax.
So that's why in season 4, I thought the ongoing plot made for stronger episodes, with all the other slice-of-life in between being really high quality too. However, I recall around that time my friends would complain that the characters never have any meaningful or permanent development. They didn't necessarily want more Adventure, but I couldn't see why they disliked the slice-of-life when it was so good. Until now, I couldn't figure out how our differing opinions fit together, or how the season might have been improved (besides the obvious weak episodes like the opener). As much as I enjoyed all those episodes, there wasn't enough contrast to make the important ones feel important.
Some of the critiques I've read about PreCure's weaker seasons eerily echo a lot of the mistakes made in MLP. Sometimes one character overshadows all the others in importance (Princess Twilight!), sometimes a villain joins the good side and none of the characters acknowledge that they were an evil enemy just a few episodes ago (every single villain except Shimmer!). Some seasons do handle them right though, so it seems useful as an apples-to-apples comparison. PreCure does have the advantage of having one writer handling the entire season -- not that MLP's team of writers is bad, but whoever's in charge of production seems to constantly change and they pick a new direction for the show. I'm pretty certain that seasons 5-7 even had this shift halfway through, so they're more like 13-episode seasons.
One thing just occurred to me, that PreCure characters are most interesting to me when they're written as pairs who work together, and seeing their relationship grow. This is something MLP focused a lot on in season 1 but not much afterwards, which might be a huge missed opportunity. Except the CMC were almost always written as a team, and I found them more endearing after season 1, probably because they were the only characters written that way.
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Yep, and that was just the Digimon anime. There are plenty more versions in other media (especially the mangas, films, and video games).
I have to admit that I generally prefer the show at its more low-key and slice-of-life, as you said, and that's why I liked Season Four so much, to the point that I thought it was a welcome return to form after Season Three's more hit-and-miss approach. Contrary to my tastes, though, other people seemed more disappointed with it at the time, for instance precisely because Twilight's princess role was largely glossed over outside the two-parters. Which is indicative, considering that a fair number liked the big game-changing episodes of Season Three (including "Magical Mystery Cure"), whereas I decidedly did not (one of the best Season Three episodes for me is "Apple Family Reunion", which should tell you everything you need to know about my tastes).
I'm not sure about the disconnect you mention there. Maybe the show's just not as skilled with its adventure arcs and myths as it is with slice-of-life stories? Even after the series premiere introduced the mythology, Princess Luna's redemption from Nightmare Moon was badly paced, since we don't see Luna's re-integration at all before Season Two, don't get a canon idea of what her corruption was like before Season Four, and don't even get any glimpse of her underlying guilt complex until Season Five. Regardless of how good it is*, it feels mismanaged being so spread out like that. And that's Luna, one of the most compelling characters to fans and the first antagonist introduced.
* My own opinions are largely: "OK, but that could've been way better."
Can't help you regarding the PreCure comparison - I didn't even know what it was till I read your blog - but this stood out:
I wasn't sure about that before I checked the Wikipedia page, but in extremis I'd probably still attribute it more to rotating writers. It's hard to tell, though, because the only other long-runner I remember lost all their original writers by around Season Five was The Simpsons, and that continued pretty strongly up until around Seasons Seven and Eight (take your pick). I think it was a factor, though, and maybe the new directors had a hand in that.
I didn't really notice any such lapse for the Main Six and Spike, to be honest. I can think of a few counterexamples, e.g. Rarity and Applejack in "Simple Ways", Spike and Rarity in "Inspiration Manifestation", and Rainbow and Twilight in "Testing Testing 1 2 3", and especially once that Map came along and basically dictated pairs in Season Five. It depends on how applicable is that "seeing their relationship grow" subclause; with one or two exceptions, I don't recall any major growth per se.
I kinda liked the more fragmentary nature of it, though; the more cohesively the team works together, the less any one member stands out for me, and the disparity among the cast has always been a major draw (again, for me). Don't get me wrong, I liked the CMC too, but their dynamic felt a tad repetitive to me around Season Four, and I largely lost interest in the group after Season Five.
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Season 5 was a little better about this, with Starlight's Town and the map missions being about character interaction.
I prefer the Slice of Life too! I think the Adventure episodes were at their best when they complemented the SoL episodes, like Rarity getting kidnapped or Fluttershy afraid of the dragon, and it was about the characters disagreeing over how to solve the problem. Instead of Twilight being the Most Important Pony and freaking out over the responsibility, again and again.
On the character pairing thing, I think there was a subtle shift where it stopped being about "learning how to be friends with someone who's different" and more about "overcoming a personal flaw (with another friend helping)" .... but to be fair there were still a few episodes about the former that I forgot about. I do think there's a problem with the emphasis on character flaws though, because it requires the characters to permanently change for it to feel meaningful. Low-key slice-of-life starts to become something more like character drama, with bigger stakes such as personal growth & life goals
and I think that's where fan opinions became divided on season 4, more so than the Princess Twilight thing. For example, Applejack was jokingly called "background pony" because she didn't have much room to grow, but I thought she was still interesting when episodes simply explored her relationships to friends and family (I really liked "Pinkie Apple Pie")
I guess I'll just chalk it up to that main problem where the show wants to change and not-change at the same time. It ended up changing anyway (and older fans gradually lost interest), but in a wishy-washy way instead of with confidence.
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Revisiting this, I think there was a major shift that contributed to a quality... er, I'll be diplomatic and say "change", though I personally am itching to use the word "drop" instead.
It was during a discussion with Dannyj about Season Eight that I looked up the writers and directors of the various seasons and episodes of MLP:FiM, and a couple of things caught my eye. Up until mid-Season Five, writing credits were largely dominated by a core of five writers or "old-timers" who'd been around since the start of the show (Amy Keating Rogers, Charlotte Fullerton, Cindy Morrow, Meghan McCarthy, and M. A. Larson) and the role of director largely rotated between and/or overlapped with three people (James Wootton, Jayson Thiessen, and Jim Miller).
Then we get a sudden change starting from Season Five, Episode Fourteen, with a completely new director Denny Lu, and all that changed after that was whether or not he directed alone (the rest of Season Five), directed with Tim Stuby (Season Six and the first quarter of Season Seven), or directed with Mike Myhre (the rest of Season Seven and all of Seasons Eight and Nine). Also, the writing staff thereafter shift to a new "guard" who, though mostly dominated by Josh Haber and Michael Vogel, also had lots of episodes belonging to a mixture of writers, few of whom wrote as many as the five "old-timers" listed above.
I can't make any firm conclusions from correlational evidence, but I think it's very telling. I myself was largely fine with the first five seasons, became less enthused by Season Six's turn, and had largely gone off it by Season Seven. That experience coincides roughly with the changes in show directors (for instance, Season Five and the change from Jim Miller to Denny Lu, Season Six and the Denny Lu + Tim Stuby "era", Season Seven onwards and the Denny Lu + Mike Myhre "era").
It's not perfect - before I looked it up, I'd have guessed any major change would have happened between seasons, not during them - but the correlation seems to explain a lot to me. That might be a reason for feeling the disconnect.