Why I Love Geology (and Dislike Maud) · 11:47pm Nov 16th, 2022
Basically, because I dislike the attitude of "Oh, you like rocks? How boring." Nuts to that. Give me Petunia Paleo any day!
"ROCKS IS MAGIC!"
Blog Number 206: Music With Rocks In Edition
First, I'll get the negative out of the way. The Season Four episode "Maud Pie" is one of those episodes everyone else loves but I don't, and Maud's a big part of that.
To this day, I still have no idea what people see in her. Maybe the awkward comedy's a "literal-minded misunderstanding" knee-slapper, and I just lack the right sense of humour? Maybe it's the whole neurodiverse subtext (the whole "don't express myself the same way" scene comes to mind)? Maybe "aw but she loves Pinkie" super-strength conquers all for some people?
I can sort of admire these impulses, but really I haven't a clue. Whatever it is, all I know is that people see some charm in Maud that's outright invisible to me.
Funny thing is, she could have turned out quite differently. Mike Cartoon Pony once made an interesting observation about the behind-the-scenes early production and development for Maud relative to that episode. The details can be found here, but in brief:
Maud's personality is different here - she's described “as eccentric as Pinkie, but her odd fascination and unusual disposition falls on the opposite end of the spectrum”. She’s likened to Aubrey Plaza’s April Ludgate from Parks and Recreation (with Minuette also being likened to Del from that show in the "Amending Fences" script, clearly a lot of people involved with FiM liked that show! As if proof was needed). She's kind and eager to make friends, but her quirkiness causes difficulties, with differences abounding in the one-on-one's, like Maud preferring a spider over woodland animals (there's no rock element yet, as the candy necklaces are just straightforward friendship bracelets).
Personally, I wouldn't have minded seeing this version of Maud, if the "April Ludgate" comparison is anything to go by. A snarky, deadpan, borderline apathetic goth would at least have had an edge to her, well-intentioned heart of gold notwithstanding.
What we got instead was a bore: drab, grey, monotonous, stoic, repetitive, unimaginatively literal-minded, obsessed with one thing that colours all her interactions, and so inscrutable that I have to take it as a given when Pinkie talks up her emotional range. Well... it's definitely a foil to Pinkie, I'll grant you that.
However, the obsession in question? The shortcut used to show us just how boring she is? The stock stereotype of soporific special interests? Rocks.
Rocks.
R-
Spike sums up my feelings exactly.
Let me tell you about real rocks.
And then later maybe, we can wonder how rock cycles work in Equestria or something. Maybe Celestia makes them? She wields a star, after all.
Well, everything's gotta start somewhere.
Anyway...
Once upon a time, there was hydrogen, helium, and not much else. No carbon, no plethora of natural elements, definitely no life.
Then, a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, the first stars began to condense out of the irregularities of the gaseous cosmic nebulae. Thus crushed, pressurized, and cooked by the sheer incomprehensible weight of their neighbours, simple atoms within the stars fused to become more complex atoms: higher elements like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, sodium, potassium, and phosphorus became possible. These are among the essential ingredients of life.
The Crab Nebula: according to Douglas Adams, home of small furry creatures who write radio scripts.
Well, she might.
Even more complex higher elements - heavier than iron - were made possible only by the extreme pressures involved in those bewilderingly vicious exploding monstrosities which we call supernovae. When Carl Sagan said we were made of stardust, he wasn't joking.
"Either that, or someone forgot to wipe the lens..."
Some of the later stars, therefore, could contain greater and greater quantities of these higher elements. Them, and the planets that accreted around them, and the moons that accreted around the planets, and finally the asteroids, comets, meteors, dwarf planets, and other space debris that are but the sawdust of cosmic carpentry. All became richer with each successive generation of stars.
In other words, everywhere you look, everything you find - every rock you see - is a product and a triumph of ancient nuclear fusion. That's the first reason why I find the "rocks are boring" trope so reductive and short-sighted. Even the origin of rocks is kinda hardcore once you get an inkling of what it involves.
There is nothing new under the sun. All the new stuff was invented in one.
Anatomy of a genius.
Even the Earth itself is a small-scale nuclear reactor, the sheer heat and pressure of its iron and nickel core becoming the heat generator for the vaguely liquid layers of mantle that circulate beneath our feet. All on a slow, slow, glacially slow scale. Geothermal vents, volcanism, tectonic plates, the shifting of the continents and seas over hundreds of centuries - and therefore the mountains and earthquakes that seem like the stirrings of gods to us - are simply the shuffling of a huddled, toasty planet making itself comfortable.
As for the layer with the rocks we know? The rocks that seem so smothering and stable and strong to us are nothing but the thin skin on top. That's right: we're living among the skin flakes of a giant, white, burning hot apple.
"Yeah, but what's it taste like?" "Apple Bloom!"
Rocks themselves cycle from volcanic cooldown to eroded sediments to compacted, cooked layers buried deep below. Sometimes they are melted down into magma. Sometimes they are unexpectedly pushed back to the surface ahead of schedule. Sometimes they end up stuck somewhere for aeons. But always, they are patiently waiting their turn on the massive merry-go-round of the rock layer, the lithosphere, that apple skin above the masses and molasses of molten mantle.
Rocks are giant causeways, devil's towers, the faces of US presidents, the pyramids of pharaohs, kilns and caves of crystals, stonehenges and memorials and monuments. Flint was humanity's ticket to spears and fires. Pumice, chalk, rock salt, the particular substances in clay and mud and soil and sand: we owe more of our lives to rocks than we realize.
Also, mountains. Mountains are cool.
And to cap it off: rocks are made of minerals and minerals are where the creativity really gets crazy. There are thousands of minerals (though roughly a hundred are all that common on Earth), wild and profligate dances of chemical elements in increasingly elaborate and bizarre patterns.
One thing that always strikes me is that chemically, soft graphite and hard diamond are basically the same thing. Pure carbon, in both cases. Yet a simple rearrangement of the same atoms in different relationships, and that's the difference between squishy black and bone-shattering glassiness. And carbon is far from the only ingredient on Earth, though it's certainly the most creative and flexible.
Carbon: never typecast. That last pic, for instance? An entire period in Earth's palaeontological history called the Carboniferous.
Minerals every colour of the rainbow. Minerals that can be greasy, silky, resinous, metallic, and other forms of lustre. Minerals in amorphous blobs and minerals in military-precise geometric shapes (even cubes!). Minerals that are fluorescent and minerals that refract light. Minerals that form crystal systems so bizarre and nigh-perfect you'd think they were the secretions of life forms.
All simply the result of no more than 92 natural elements going to town.
Gotta catch 'em all!
Some rocks were even alive once.
We owe Jurassic Park to rocks.
God dear God, don't get me started on the proliferation of prehistoric life captured in the pages of palaeontology...
Rocks have their own stories, but they even tell us - via those who know how to read the layers and production rates and continental drift speed and even radioactive decay (that's right: some rocks have status effects... like poison!) - that Earth the Planet is Herself the ultimate war veteran.
Strange but true: if Earth didn't have so many geologically destructive and creative processes, She'd look like our pockmarked neighbour too.
And even then, She's still got plenty of scars of Her own.
She's seen billions of years of bombardments and breakaways and tectonic trauma. One theory goes so far as to suggest that the moon - which is geologically similar to Earth - was created when a Mars-sized planet collided with ours, blasting off masses of molten rock so violently that they were ejected into gradual local orbit.
Insert Big Bang joke here.
The Earth: She's seen it all. Astronomical adjustments as the sun warms through its life cycle. Biological breakthroughs in Her churning seas. Mass extinction madnesses, fads-turned-fossils, and cycles within cycles within cycles as ecosystems repeatedly came and went.
She's seen some crazy stuff, man. Stuff we can barely comprehend.
Or something. Seriously, this was the best "try to show a little respect" pic I could find.
That's way before I get into the cultural clothing and mythopoeic backstories humans have dreamed up about rocks over the millennia. But I think I've said enough.
So, that's basically why I like rocks so much. They're not just background: they're quietly and powerfully putting on shows of their own. Rocks that seem so lifeless and dull to the everyday are actually lively and vibrant on the grandest of grand scales, a cast of mindlessly brilliant characters in the matter matinee of Creation, each with their own scars and stamps of fiery, flowing history.
Rocks are part of the puzzle: the very weird, very violent, very crazy, very creative puzzle of the universe. Is it any wonder life is so complex and strange and inventive? We had some pretty prolific predecessors.
And for a kid, the first step is as simple as wondering where to find a dinosaur...
That's all for now. Impossible Numbers, out.
Pic and gif sources, excluding MLP:FiM show screenshots:
- https%3A%2F%2Fi.kym-cdn.com%2Fphotos%2Fimages%2Foriginal%2F000%2F218%2F576%2F27a.gif
- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Star_Life_Cycle_Chart.jpg/1920px-Star_Life_Cycle_Chart.jpg
- https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/00/Crab_Nebula.jpg/1024px-Crab_Nebula.jpg
- https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/mlpfimroleplay/images/f/fc/Vinyl_Scratch2.png/revision/latest?cb=20161222190627
- https://miro.medium.com/max/672/1*6MUyun4RqF_97NKD05Hj8g.jpeg
- https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/images/462977main_sun_layers_full.jpg
- https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2015/whataretheea.jpg
- https://preview.redd.it/560rqsze2ab81.png?width=640&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=b06ed30a52355022cf9a654deaa99606be893638
- https://zakirahana.files.wordpress.com/2020/05/diamond-graphite.jpg
- https://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/news/sci-tech/images/2019/4/1/co2-gas-pollution-carbon-dioxide-emission-gas-shut.jpg
- https://media.wired.co.uk/photos/606daac39f060d3b864d6a32/1:1/w_1883,h_1883,c_limit/gettyimages-163310627.jpg
- https://images.newscientist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/10170642/gettyimages-160380750.jpg?width=800
- https://i.natgeofe.com/n/ee7b951c-cf0a-44c4-b8ba-bf5c4d20009c/870.jpg
- https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/various-minerals-names-isolated-white-set-cassiterite-peridotite-jaspillite-prasiolite-turquoise-cuprite-beryl-howlite-116596882.jpg
- https://as2.ftcdn.net/v2/jpg/01/20/74/97/1000_F_120749747_1AJZe3nkpc4MyM9cn1EX8xPB9p1PI0L9.jpg
- https://www.nationalmuseum.gov.ph/wp-content/themes/yootheme/cache/Fluorescent-Minerals-scaled-04b8fa21.jpeg
- http%3A%2F%2Fcdn.cnn.com%2Fcnnnext%2Fdam%2Fassets%2F200916054801-restricted-01-stan-t-rex-auction-scli-intl-super-tease.jpg
- https://www.scienceabc.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/moon-craters.jpg
- https://i.ytimg.com/vi/p5fdbowk7X8/maxresdefault.jpg
- https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/LMiHJF_vce42Y6f3ukrhFB2v8Ks=/0x0:2048x1536/2400x1356/filters:focal(1024x768:1025x769)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/15898731/Teia_Terra_art.0.0.1473693962.jpg
- https%3A%2F%2Fi.imgflip.com%2F3c6evh.jpg
- https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/f/ea656545-c0c2-426c-bc41-e47ce5c7a0c9/df6zvqz-89bf9134-310f-43a8-bdf2-af4fe32c4b6a.png/v1/fill/w_1193,h_670,strp/professor_fossil__petunia_paleo__and_ponysaurus_by_andoanimalia_df6zvqz-pre.png?token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJzdWIiOiJ1cm46YXBwOjdlMGQxODg5ODIyNjQzNzNhNWYwZDQxNWVhMGQyNmUwIiwiaXNzIjoidXJuOmFwcDo3ZTBkMTg4OTgyMjY0MzczYTVmMGQ0MTVlYTBkMjZlMCIsIm9iaiI6W1t7ImhlaWdodCI6Ijw9MzAwOCIsInBhdGgiOiJcL2ZcL2VhNjU2NTQ1LWMwYzItNDI2Yy1iYzQxLWU0N2NlNWM3YTBjOVwvZGY2enZxei04OWJmOTEzNC0zMTBmLTQzYTgtYmRmMi1hZjRmZTMyYzRiNmEucG5nIiwid2lkdGgiOiI8PTUzNjAifV1dLCJhdWQiOlsidXJuOnNlcnZpY2U6aW1hZ2Uub3BlcmF0aW9ucyJdfQ.PvTOV1Q0d1-_dTO14oIRymHaYEje1jIpaoJOggmH0pM
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Who knew rocks were cool? I long ago had to specialize since the sheer number of them in my collection grew too big, so now I mostly collect ones with specific chemistry. But I also make room for ones with cool properties, like fluorescence, radioactivity, or striking shape/color. Unfortunately, a few are photoreactive, so I have to keep them in the dark.
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Sadly, I never really started a collection of my own (for one thing, I'd have nowhere to put them). We have an amethyst in our house, though, kept in a small case, and (if only for that sole personal reason) I've had a soft spot for the mineral since basically forever.
I do love seeing them exhibited in museums, though. The Natural History Museum in London, for instance, is one of my must-visit locations whenever I go to the city, at least partly because of its collection of rock, mineral, and crystal samples.
Very much this. It's why I love Maud, she's one of my favorite secondary characters. I grew up neurodivergent, specifically autistic, before the concept of neurodivergence really existed, and the only form autism that anyone (including a lot of medical professionals) knew was the non-verbal "idiot savant" stereotype. People like me were just "freaks" and "discipline problems". Maud's flat affect, unusual obsession, and strange (by pony standards) fashion sense really hit home for me. I wasn't nearly as flatly affected as Maud, but every bit as obsessive. The most common description of me by my peers typically included the words "weird", "annoying", and "boring". Needless to say, I didn't really have any friends to speak of for most of my childhood.
I fell in love with the character almost immediately, and each subsequent episode featuring her just made me appreciate her more. I know nearly all MLP fans find Mudbriar even more off-putting than Maud; but I can definitely relate to him as well.
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Honestly, I wish I could enjoy her more from that angle, because on paper it sounds great. My interest in psychology alone means I take a special interest in neurodiversity - heck, I've increasingly wondered over time whether or not I'd qualify under that umbrella - so its various depictions in popular media also snag my interest (though I dislike how the "idiot savant" stereotype dominates perceptions of autism: it feels like some kind of weird overcompensation logic). And the episode "Maud Pie" certainly plays out a lot like an episode specifically devoted to the topic of dealing with people who are cognitively atypical.
I'm not too far from the Smithsonian, which has a natural history museum, including an extensive mineral collection and a nice case of fluorescent ones that darkens so you can activate a UV light.
It's not too hard to make space for a very small number of minerals that exhibit some property you particularly like. For instance, if amethyst appeals to you because of its deep purple, then a display of things like Sugilite, Purpurite, Charoite, and Fluorite display well, and small samples can be had relatively cheaply. Assuming of course you have more self-control than me and can stop there.
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You clearly haven't seen my book collection.
Although I suppose you have a point, if I just wanted a small set of samples. That'd be more feasible.
Goodness me, though, I'd love to visit the Smithsonian someday. Those fluorescent minerals would be amazing to look at. Come to think of it, the American Museum of Natural History is on my bucket list too. There are a lot of museums in the world I'd like to visit, if I ever get the money to travel.
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Hey, if you do ever decide to visit the various Smithsonian museums, drop me a note. I live about a hour's drive and a half-hour metro ride from there, and it's been a while since I visited. I don't get up to DC for much other than to see the occasional baseball game when the Cardinals come by to play the Nationals.
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In fairness, I would guess the reason most people who love Maud and dislike Mudbriar do so because they want Maud all to themselves.
Jesus Christ, Marie, they're minerals!
If it's not your humour, it's not your humour. But if you'd like more specific insight, to me, the humour of Maud is not in the awkwardness, but in the exaggeration and contrast. Her dull colours, monotonous voice, and singular obsession with what many would consider a fairly mundane topic could make her actually boring if played totally straight in a more tonally serious show, but FiM is generally written to comically exaggerate character traits like these. She's not a boring person; she's a caricature of a boring person. And if written well (i.e. by someone other than the Fox brothers), her boringness is so comically exaggerated that it circles right back around to being funny again (e.g. "This next one is about rocks. They're all about rocks.")
And this is only the first layer of Maud humour, because that's just the basic straightforward "Maud is boring" joke. Maud episodes also tend to go one step further, because having now established that Maud is a boring person who has boring interests and does boring things, you now have the perfect set-up to comically subvert expectations by having her do something totally out of the blue, like shatter rocks with an unexpected display of super strength, or hit Discord with a sick burn, or casually enable Starlight's villainy. This kind of contrast works especially well for Maud, and I think the lack of any contrasts like these is why the conceptually similar characters of Sans Smirk and Mudbriar didn't resonate with audiences the same way.
I definitely think she would have been a interesting character to follow.
I think it's like Rarity.
Having a onscreen character to embody the passion and drive of a certain topic, makes said topic much more interesting by comparison.
Maud does show passion and knowledge of rocks, but it's subdued and not really often focused on.
Incidentally this is one of the reasons why pony Rainbow Dash fell flat for me. She never has to take her Wonderbolt pursuits seriously.
I think this show (and others) was a bit too obsessed with opposites and wound up tripping over it's own feet.
You had a bunch of ideas that never amounted to much, because they never complimented each other the way other more conventional associations would.
Discord is definitely in opposition to Fluttershy. He also has almost no scenes with her that don't feel forced because of it.
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Yeah, I can definitely relate to certain aspects of Maud and Mud Briar.
Of course, that may be a consequence of having grown up with the Raven from the orginal Teen Titans show.
It would seem that Maud is a much more exaggerated version of her in some respects.
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Myself, one reason I dislike Mudbriar is because he's Maud without the few redeeming features. Another is because he reminds me too much of that smug know-it-all from The Big Bang Theory. Their voices even sound similar.
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Breaking Bad references aside, I find it hard not to drag minerals into the conversation when talking about rocks. Heck, I managed to drag in supernovae of all things. That should tell you what I'm like.
There's a logic to that, definitely. It's similar to the TV Tropes concept of "Crossing the Line Twice" re: cruelty. A character does something funny that crosses the line into being not funny (e.g. cruel), but then it gets treated so casually or gets pushed to an extreme so hard that it's suddenly impossible to take seriously and becomes funny again.
I suppose so, though personally I prefer subversions that have some degree of absurd mockery to them (see: every instant of Rarity mucking up her own "sophisticated" classy persona). Maud comes off as too perfect, too flawless (note the onus is chiefly on the Main Six to do all the reaching out legwork in her debut), too distant, or too unlikeable to hit that sweet note for me (see: the last two examples of subversions that you cite).
That is a plausible framework, though, at least intellectually in my case (like the neurodiverse thing). Especially re: cases where it doesn't work, like those last two characters you mention (I'll have to take your word for Sans Smirk, because I never watched that episode).
Overall, I guess this is generally one of my main stumbling blocks with Maud: she never crosses that line into being really endearingly or laughably "ridiculous" in my eyes. For you and others, she's a parody of a boring person, so when she says she's written thousands of rock poems, it's a case of "Oh, Maud, you! Silly old Maud!" (cue laugh track).
Whereas for me... she's just a boring person, with no real flaws or shortcomings (acknowledged as such) or absurdly tangled incongruities. The same poem scene makes me feel irritated with her, because in some sense it feels too... I don't want to say realistic, but plausible? Earnest? Serious? Played straight?
It probably comes back to the whole "feels like a PSA for neurodiversity" aspect, but that elusive "OTT ridiculousness" never clicks for me. I end up feeling more like Rainbow Dash: frustrated and vaguely annoyed. "Ridiculous" in the wrong way.
And then it circles right back round to my dislike of seeing geology used as a stereotypical shortcut for "boring" either way.
I am a very bad person, because "The Gift of the Maud Pie" is (ironically, since it's the only Maud ep you dislike) the only Maud episode where she actually works for me. Because she's simply the straight mare to the histrionics of Pinkie and especially Rarity. I am your antiparticle, DannyJ. I will annihilate you!
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Rarity is literally the only reason I have anything approaching a tangential understanding of fabric and fashion, because those topics normally have no attraction for me whatsoever.
You mention Maud having some kind of passion, though personally I'd just call it an obsession. It largely amounts to throwing around geological jargon (and I am itching one of these days to check them and see if they're being used properly; pedantry is its own punishment). Whereas Petunia is introduced squealing over a skull she just dug up. As CoffeeMinion once pointed out, she's more like Pinkie in that respect.
Yes, yes, yes, setting aside the awfully rushed way we got from A to Z ("Keep Calm and Flutter On" is not an episode I'm remotely fond of), but in hindsight, I feel like the contrast between Discord and Fluttershy could actually have worked in a more committed and careful (and frankly darker) show. The trouble is that sort of framework requires more "rocky criminal rehabilitation" and less "aw they're friends now aren't they cute".
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lh4.googleusercontent.com/h8VvBxUnHv5f_WgsTx4GQ52U4G7ChB7xUv1A1FQcu_MPbrsMZMbykMX9kq-dnvvL-RMrHZ5x9awmsCrQNKLUSEybyDama_UkYhD6PIyOVxoD-kJ7-aK__3hU3nyk2fPAO5XhtKwPfoomXxlBv3MEk6PYxQoC1mgYufgP1liOMi27zngQid6_b_-BOr2FXQ
Flipside of course being that this makes them perfect fanfic bait.
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Yeah, I can see that. As much as I like Maud, she's not really waifu material for me. That space is reserved for Purple Bookhorse.
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That's the unofficial tagline for the show, isn't it? My Little Pony: Perfect Fanfic Bait.
So the lesson from this blog is for me to dig up more radical differences early in an episode's production that aren't obviously worse and more primitive than what we got, because that's what gets people's attention. Got it.
In all seriousness, while I don't find Maud to be an absolute bore the way you do, as you know, I am firmly in "she works far better as a supporting player" camp. And indeed I was surprised at how better-than-I-remembered The Gift of the Maud Pie fared. But I do get her enough to concede the appeal to the neurodivergent crowd, even if I do not really share in that appeal myself. And as others have noted, that she's not played straight her deadpan makes her far more memorable and endearing then the Mudbriars and Sans Smirks of the world (seriously, why did they give the Weird Al comeback episode to the dullest writers in the show.
Can't add much to what yourself and DannyJ have said (I fall in between those extremes, sometimes leaning towards yourself, sometimes towards him), but as those who clicked the link may have noticed, you weren't alone in finding her not working: during animatic feedback of her debut episode, The Hub (who typically don't have many notes relative to Hasbro directly) were very unsure on Maud's flat performance, finding her to come across as borderline braindead, and feeling the awkward slow-paced humour simply would not work for children. They suggested a lot (a POV section where we hear her thoughts, exaggerating the deadpan, varying her cadence, nostril flares/subtle facial expression, a wiry/wispy but forced quality to her voice), even checking whether she's been sound processed. Hasbro an the Hub went back and forth, even looping DHX in. Eventually, they agreed to trust DHX's assurances that Pinkie's manic visual actions in animations would make the contrast and endear Maud to the kids. They did agree to exaggerate the Mane 5's reactions visually, and to pay close attention during the score and sound mix.
Regardless of whether one thinks that paid off (evidently IN does not
), the fact that DHX had built up enough trust to say "don't worry, the animation will make it work", for a toy commercial show for a toy company that must always be instantly readable to kids and cannot risk flying over their heads, should say a lot about how even Hasbro and The Hub knew they had performed well above the call on the show.
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What can I say? People really like "what ifs". For me, there's just such a fascination in looking down the path not taken, rather than in pointing out how dumb a dumb thing is.
I think that's why I liked her more in Gift as well. Without the front-and-centre distractions of having to actively confront Maud at her absolute Maudiest, she's a natural candidate for a simple-yet-effective comedy trio. Rarity talking up the fire in her eyes legitimately makes me laugh because Maud's stoicism completely belies the increasingly tense hysteria - and yet the selfsame blank slate quality somehow still comes across as dangerously tense.
For once, I'm on their side.
In fact, I really like the POV suggestion. Speculatively speaking, I do wonder if a lot of my reservations would've been abated if we'd gotten a better idea of Maud's innermost thoughts, because the inscrutability is part of the handicap for me. It could also have strengthened the PSA-like feel of her debut, because generally it's recommended to help people understand others' thought processes rather than leave them an unrelatable mystery.
No, IN does not.
Sorry, felt like a moment for an ironic echo.
I mean, was that a consistent thing or a one-off? Before we run off with any hasty generalizations, I mean.
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I do not recall any other examples that severe in either Seasons 4 or 5, though it's worth noting far less animatic notes were left for Season 5 scripts, especially around the time of the Hub's change to Discovery Family (which occurred for previewing the animatic of Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?, I believe), where they only gave Standards & Practises notes.
However, I did witness a bit of uncertainty here and there about primarily visual things that needs character animation to work, and not just swapping between animatic still frames. Basically, the execs can't easily visualise the final episode off the animatic the way the artists up at DHX can. Different skillset, you know. By Season 4, these notes realise more as "I trust you'll plus this sufficiently, we're chiming in just to be sure it get that bit extra", so I'd wager the early Season 1 (which I haven't looked at in detail yet) had a bit of that, though they had the benefit of having Lauren Faust there in LA to appraise such things on their end.
Occasionally an aspect of an episode wouldn't become clear wasn't working until animatic, in which case the execs and DHX would scramble to rewrite the offending section in email correspondence. Examples of this includes redoing the memory of the birthday party in For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils (this is why Princess Celestia is in the credits for that episode despite never speaking in it), or tossing out former song lyrics (that hadn't been altered enough in transitioning them to dialogue) in the show-off between Apple Jewel and Hick Rarity in Simple Ways for the dialogue build-up we got. This is very rare, though, especially as it's dependant on the needed pickup lines needed from the voice actors coinciding with them having session scheduled for another episode very close, to lock the animatic for shipping overseas. So the pipeline's purpose of not changing the script once it was locked, bar shortening it as necessary, was adhered to 99% of the time.
By and large, though, Hasbro's notes mostly concerned visual reconstruction of moments to make dialogue or plot elements land better. Worth noting that the animatic Hasbro first sees has already has some cuts made, but not the full amount to get down to the 22 minute runtime. So very occasionally they request or demand to bring back in a dropped bit. Incidentally, Meghan McCarthy chimed in to this feedback towards the end of Season 4, and did almost nothing but this (she Story Edited them, a bit attached, you might say).
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A pretty well-oiled machine, then, if it was mostly small-scale rewrites in particular scenes? If so, I wonder if that changed at all for Season Six onwards. It could have been a contributing factor for the different "feel" of the show, for instance (such as the pacing of certain episodes, with "Applejack's 'Day' Off" being an obvious extreme case).
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Actually, the opposite is true. As far as I can tell, the execs paid less attention in the Season Six-Nine era, at least after the script stage. The animatic feedback notes during that season virtually never extend past a page, and quite a few don't even breach half a page (whereas during Season 4, virtually all were at least two pages, and some three).
There are a few reasons for this (the movie, and then G5 plans, absorbing their time and focus certainly must play a factor), but one key reasons is that the scripts in Season Seven (I haven't bothered looking at Seasons Eight or Nine) marked a notable format change. They specify info not normally present, have slightly changes in lines per page, state the episode "lesson" early on even if it's never in dialogue, and most notably, are shorter, in the 23-26 page range. Season 4 scripts were in the 30-34 range, while Seasons 5 & 6 were in the 28-31 range. It's a good shorthand, with FiM scripts, to assume that 1 page equals 50 seconds of screentime, though that does of course vary wildly from page-to-page. So, if you were to take a locked script, and edit out all the bits cut from the final episode, you'd probably have 25 pages remaining (and don't forget, visual gags or shots are added not present or even hinted at in the script, all part and parcel of the process).
Now, Season 4's scripts was generally too long. You write that much, you're gonna be throwing out a lot, and some episodes ran into hiccups as a result (Twilight Time and Power Ponies being the most obvious examples). However, with a show like FiM, you actually WANT to be a few pages over, so the Season 5/6 lengths are ideal enough. There's a key reason – you cannot fully tell how well the pacing and flow of a scene will work until you see it in animatic form. It's why storyboarding is such an important part of animation. Normally, if something isn't working there, you just revise the script and come back. But because FiM's writing and animatics are produced fully separate from one another, and the former isn't allowed to be adjusted willy-nilly both for legal, schedule and budget reasons (this is the norm for both toy commercial cartoons and most Canadian-animated shows, to clarify), the script being over somewhat is a good thing. It gives the DHX staff the freedom to lean the cuts they make to parts that aren't working or those which mangle the pacing/flow of a scene (and in this, it's actually helpful that FiM isn't much of a serialised show, where most of an episode only affects that particular episode, and thus both some plot points can be dropped alongside the gags). It's like a film editor getting more footage than will be used in the final film, and every scene initially being overlong, gives them the freedom to pick the best bits. This can't alleviate pacing at the base structure or conceptual level, of course, so episode can and do still suffer from that. But it is a major part of how DHX makes the episodes engaging.
Anyway, for whatever reason, in Season 7, this trend was dropped, and the average length of scripts got shorter. This meant far fewer cuts were needed, and thus it wasn't as easy to amend flow on a scene-by-scene basis (though the upside was it made it easier for the storyboard artists to insert bits of their own that would survive). And then you get an episode like Forever Filly, who's script comes out at 23.33 pages – actually too short. Somewhat explaining the many slow, protracted shots throughout, especially the ones where the dog just yawns and the like. They would have done their initial animatic, found it barely came out ahead of the 21-min runtime as opposed to several minutes, and thus the snugging up of shots to quicken the flow would have happened much less.
In general, though, very nearly any pacing problems simply come back to the script. Season Six's scripts kept within the same length wheelhouse as Season Five's, and while Applejack's Day Off was on the short end of that, at 27.94 pages, it would have still needed some cuts (as a contrast, To Where and Back Again - Part 2 was 32 pages, and the first animatic of that, which a storyboard artist uploaded publicly about a year ago, was four minutes over, and that was after some initial cuts: I estimate the whole script would have been 6m40s over). Nope, episodes like that feeling plodding is down purely to the writers (thanks, Fox brothers) and general tone Josh Haber installed. Whatever Jim Miller and the crew certainly aren't totally absent of blame in this era, they were still plussing the scripts tenfold through the visuals, flow, voice acting, music and cadence of the show.
Apologies for the roundabout way of getting to this answer! But this all felt relevant enough to the point at hand.
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I enjoy your behind the scenes insight, so for the sake of my curiosity, I'm going to need you to please elaborate on both of these statements.
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The link IN used before was from my comments on Loganberry’s My Little Repeats rewatch of the series, where alongside rewatching each episode myself, I would thereafter go through each episode’s production documents and note anything of interest. Then I posted a summary of such in the comments there, with the loose intent of maybe making some blogs out of them one day. Still yet to do that proper (though I did do a 7-part series on all unused Season 5 episode premises, plus a whole blog on the early version of *The Cutie Re-Mark*). But, they’re there on Logan’s blog, to see for any episode. Here’s the ones for Power Ponies, Twilight Time and For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils. The Power Ponies one may not exactly answer how over time it went initially, but Jim Miller did comment once that the very first timed animatic (so before any cuts) came to 32 minutes. Obviously a lot of that was not yet nailing the timing for all the visual action, but it still says a lot, doesn’t it? Meanwhile, Twilight Time, alongside many other cuts, scrapped a whole 2-page scene, and had so many trims it resulted in Twilight’s line “time ever what you’d aid about giving another chance?” calling back to a piece of cut dialogue. As for the Sweetie Belle episode, I’ll let the comment speak for itself there.
I grant they’re not polished for presentation, being compressed to fit in multiple comments, but hopefully they suffice.
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Thanks. I'll give these a look.
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Both Twilight and Discord have aspects of this to their character, so it didn't bother me too much.
Mud Briar just feels like the kind of guy you blow off if he's wrong.
And unlike Sheldon, he's not actively trying to force himself down our throats here.
If anything, it's Pinkie Pie and Maud's refusal to accept that he's woefully unprepared for socializing that causes the episode's drama.
Maybe that's just me though.
Frankly I was just glad that Maud found someone who didn't find her off-putting.
I know what I like, and I've learned the names for things I like, and that's about it.
Rarity has similar tastes to me though.
I also find it interesting that they based a protagonist off of traits that are almost universally vilified in modern media.
Incidentally, Rarity also feels like the most well rounded character of the series.
She has a job and hobby she's passionate about, and she regularly interacts with people from outside her social circles.
This fills and defines her interpersonal drama, making it feel believable, while distinct from episode to episode.
Lastly she has little to none of the contrived plot obligations that derailed the arcs of far too many of the other characters (including the main cast).
Possibly. Either one can make for good character building, done well. And I don't hate Maud's interests, such as they are.
I do think it would have been interesting if they had managed to squeeze additional rock facts in the episodes.
Then again, I have learned not to expect educational facts from cartoon writers.
I suppose it's border line impressive that they even knew what a geode was.
In fairness, most modern cartoons aren't educational in the slightest.
I think the Pie Sisters as a whole would have worked better if they had been siblings for Rarity.
All have personalities that would clash amusingly with Rarity's own emotional nature, and it would make sense that a rock farmer's daughter would have a nose for precious stones.
Contrastingly, Pinkie Pie should have been paired with much younger siblings. Forever Filly would have been so much more natural had Pinkie Pie been the one infantilizing her sibling.
But if I talk about the missed opportunities in regards to Pinkie Pie, we really will be here all day.
Not even darker per say. Committed.
Discord is still plenty capable of being a jerk in the show. He's just rarely put up against Fluttershy while doing it.
This is ironically the one thing I think "Make New Friends But Keep Discord" gets right (even though it goes overboard in the execution).
The problem I have with their friendship is that it is almost entirely based on them looking physically attractive together.
Pinkie Pie or even Rainbow Dash would have had much more believable interactions, because they like a lot of the same things as Discord.
By contrast, I always get the feeling when Fluttershy and Discord are together that he's humoring her, which is definitely not a natural part of his character.
I feel the being cute angle could have worked, but you would have needed a incentive for Discord that actually works.
Drinking tea and petting bunnies isn't really his style, and outside of a couple of brief mentions and one late series scene, there's not a whole lot of effort by the writers to convince us otherwise.
This also dragged down Fluttershy's arc, because she was inhabiting a character role that wasn't natural to her, and which inhibited her overall development.
In the end, they wound up together because some fanfiction writer thought they looked cute.
That's not a exaggeration by the way, they literally used some nobody writer to draft that episode.