Help! My Heart is Full of Pony! - Applejack · 4:17am May 14th, 2020
A lot of people claim that Applejack has no character development, but this is simply not true. In fact, she has perhaps the most linear character development in the whole series. It stretches across 3 episodes which, in my mind, contitute a trilogy: Applebuck Season, The Last Roundup, and Apple Family Reunion.
These three episodes explore three sides of the same idea, and manages to convey an incredibly complex back story that motivates Applejack's every move, and yet, tell that story in a sideways fashion, presenting each angle presented with both elegance and simplicity.
Applebuck Season is the very first episode in the entire series to focus on just one pony in particular. (The pilot, and The Ticket Master had both been ensemble pieces). The very first thing the show does is characterize Applejack as stubborn. For those who don't remember, Applejack is stuck doing all of the harvest chores by herself. As a matter of pride, she refuses to accept help, even as she drives herself to the point of exhaustion, and ends up bungling a series of simple tasks that she'd previously committed to (before knowing that she'd be stuck carrying the whole farm by herself).
The crux of the story is presented as Applejack learning to overcome her pride, and Twilight learning how to intervene without insulting her. But what's really going on here runs deeper than mere stubbornness. Skip forward a season-and-a-half to The Last Roundup. Applejack hops on a train to compete in the rodeo after promising all of Ponyville that she would win, and use the prize money to fix Town Hall. After the competition, however, Applejack mysteriously disappears. Twilight and friends track her down. Eventually, they find AJ doing manual labor for a cherry farmer named Cherries Jubilee, but Applejack refuses to explain why. She won't tell her friends what the problem is, or even admit that there is a problem at all. It's odd, erratic behavior.
After much drama and a dramatic chase scene, it is revealed that Applejack had won several ribbons at the rodeo, but had not taken first place in a single event, nor won a single bit in prize money. The whole reason that Applejack had fled Ponyville, and committed herself to working odd jobs was to raise money to pay for a new Town Hall (rather than return in shame, having failed to fulfill her promise).
If you look at these two stories together, it's not about a pony who is simply stubborn, or who is obsessed with winning. Applejack, for her entire life, has defined herself by her dependability.
That promise of winning the rodeo was everything to her precisely because it was a promise.
The Element of Honesty is about more than simply telling the truth all the time - it's a certain kind of integrity. There are no excuses whatsoever with Applejack. She holds herself to a high standard, and that standard means concrete results. No matter what. Being able to do the harvest by herself; being able to raise the money that she'd promised to save Town Hall. It was all about providing for others. The defining element of Applejack's personality is not, in fact, stubbornness. It's dependability.
This all makes sense when you think about it. It would be many many seasons before the show decided to directly address Applejack's parents, and what had happened to them, but their absence was always felt. Lauren Faust herself has stated in interviews that it was always her intention to convey that Applejack's parents had died. The only reason that she never wrote that story directly into season one was that Hasbro had prevented her from telling it how she felt it deserved to be told.
Bearing this in mind, stop to think about how this experience must have shaped Applejack. She was probably barely a teenager when her sister was born, and when her parents died. Applejack had to step to the plate. She had the support of Granny Smith, and Big Macintosh of course, but for a long time, she'd been the one running the farm, and for a long time, she had also been raising her sister - doing the work of a real parent - all before she herself had properly grown up.
Applejack built her entire life and entire identity around her family, and that life has been defined by sacrifices and devotion. She has been thrust into in a position where the buck always stopped with her - where she had no choice but to be dependable. The common good of all that she loved and cared about was at stake.
This brings me to the third part of a trilogy, Apple Family Reunion.
In case you don't remember, this episode centers around a reunion (as the title might suggest) that happens once every 100 moons. This time, it's being hosted at Sweet Apple Acres, and Granny Smith is too old to run the event anymore.
Applejack, Apple Bloom, and Granny Smith look through the old photo album together, and reminisce about what these reunions mean to the Apple family. This time around, it falls on Applejack to make the whole thing come together, so of course she puts tremendous pressure on herself to live up to the legacy of her ancestors.
There's a shot in this episode that tells us everything you need to know about Applejack as a character. After looking through that photo album with Apple Bloom, and Granny, Applejack goes to the window, and sees a pair of shooting stars (obviously meant to symbolize her parents looking down on her). It is in this moment that she develops her resolve - not only to succeed in organizing a family reunion, but to honor her roots, and organize the best reunion ever.
The problem is: Applejack forces everypony into so many stupid activities, that the family doesn't get to have any quiet time together to talk, or to bond as friends. We see this play out both with the young ones (as Apple Bloom desperately attempts to catch up with her cousin, Babs Seed), and with the old folks who, rather than reconnecting, and sewing the family quilt in a quiet, zen sort of way, are forced into an assembly line of sorts.
Of course, it all comes crashing down - in this case, literally - destroying their barn.
I'm not sure if you remember, but in this moment, Applejack is completely and utterly devastated. It's the shame of her failures in Applebuck Season and Last Roundup magnified a hundred fold. She had done the morally unthinkable - she had left her family down.
The episode ends with the realization that it's not the activities themselves that make a family reunion great, it's the memories we build with our loved ones. The extended Apple Family comes together for one last group activity - rebuilding the barn (as I'm sure you recall from the hoedown number, "Raise This Barn").
The final scene of Apple Family Reunion centers around AJ and her immediate family pasting pictures into the scrap book (after all their extended kin had hopped in their wagons and gone on their way). Applejack once again drifts over to the doorway, and looks up at the night sky, and once again, she sees the same two shooting stars - her parents looking down on her. This time, it's taken as a sign of approval.
That epitomizes who Applejack is as a person (pony) - the kid who stepped up and took over her parents' job when she was far too young to do so. The pony who made herself dependable because she had to. The pony who spends her whole life filling those empty horseshoes that her parents had left behind.
It's all there, hidden between the lines - this beautiful back story that the show wasn't allowed to tell. Applejack is strong. Devoted. Dependable. A source of inspiration if you take the time to think about who she really is deep down inside, and the challenges she must have had to face to become the pony we all know.
-Sprocket
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As usual, thank you so much for these looks you provide. :)
We do get a hint of these hidden depths in "Where the Apple Lies." It appears to be shortly after the parents passed, and even then, Applejack was trying to provide for her family. It's just that she hadn't quite figured out how. Character growth means that going back will see character shrinkage, and that's definitely the case with AJ.
Thank you, Sprocket. You always provide such warm and insightful thoughts and insights into the characters we love so much. Your writings always give us much to think about and bring us together as a community.
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Going To Seed does more than hint. In it, AJ explicitly states how she was so disappointed in herself for not being able to help out with the harvest one year after falling into her own trap. A pretty major implication is that just a few years later (perhaps just one), her parents would end up dead, based on the fact that Pear Butter was carrying an infant Applebloom. So she blames the thought of the Great Seedling, and her own gullibility, for wasting the precious time she had left with Bright Mac and Pear Butter. The embarrassment over that incident probably helped lay the foundations for her workaholism.