G5 is (sadly) dead · 10:57pm Nov 13th, 2023
Beware, science ahead.
Frequent Derpibooru visitors may have notice that after every Tell Your Tale episode, the frontpage gets flooded with pics. Well, one could say that's a proof that the title of this blog is clickbait (it is), since apparently there's a lot of activity in the fandom.
Well, yes, but actually no.
Screencap not mine, but it was my inspiration
Right. Someone's on a mission from God. To screencap every single frame of every episode and put it on derpibooru for everyone to see. To boldly come where no pony has come before. To preserve history of the G5 show.
When you realise you forgot to clear your browser history
How bad is it? Well, I decided to find out. In order to do this, I switched my derpibooru filter to everything and checked the percentage of screencaps for every G5 Mane Six character (+ one annoying baby dragon). Then, I did the same for the G4 Mane Six (+ one less annoying baby dragon). The results are as follows:
I banged Alphabittle. I'm your new mom now!
Izzy Moonbow:
18,947 pics. 8300 screencaps, which gives 43.8%
Sunny Starscout:
18,240 pics. 8387 screencaps, which gives roughly 46%
Pipp Petals:
18,330 pics. 9224 screencaps, which gives 50.32%
Zipp Storm:
14,512 pics (ripp Zipp). 7539 screencaps, which is roughly 52%
Hitch Trailblazer:
11,989 pics. 6279 screencaps, which gives 52.4%
Another proof Hitch and Zipp should be together (art by Maren)
blue cinnamon roll Misty Brightdawn:
6014 pics. 3689 screencaps, which gives 61.34%
Sparky Sparkeroni:
3044 pics. 2613 screencaps, which gives 85.85%
Sparky is quite shite — Sockpuppet, while helping me interpret the data in this blog. Art by FrownFactory
How does this look for G4? Well...
Art by PonyBerserker
Twilight Sparkle:
348,591 pics. 57,942 screencaps, which gives 16.62%
Rarity:
212,183 pics. 39,116 screencaps, which gives 18.43%
Pinkie Pie:
249,109 pics, 40,915 screencaps, which gives 16.42%
Applejack:
195,541 pics (less than the rest of the Mane 6, but more than most background ponies), 35,212 screencaps, which is almost exactly 18% (18.007 actually).
Rainbow Dash:
271,899 pics, 41,695 screencaps, which gives 15.33%. Does it mean she's 20% cooler than Applejack?
Fluttershy:
251,039 pics, 35,959 screencaps, which gives 14.32%
Spike:
90,276 pics, 23,826 screencaps, which gives 26.4%
So, it seems that unfortunately, artist just don't really give a damn about G5. In case of pretty much everyone, nearly a half of the art are show screencaps, which means a large part of the activity they get comes from some really dedicated madman (or more likely a whole group of them). Did everything go wrong right after the movie? Or is the fandom tired after G4/nostalgic for it? A bit of both? Something else?
It's simple, gen 4 artstyle just clicks. It amazing. What can you do with CGI gen 5 ponies? Not much. Especially since a lot of them really have poor coloring scheme.
I'd suggest giving DeviantArt a look, as the G5 art community is a lot more active there.
Man I needed to see your name again, time to reread of Sleepless and well, this is awkward after years. Also I haven't seen episode of the show since like 2015 so..... is G5 worth watching?
And to answer your question,
I think, from what I've seen and read, that g5 does not have the ''vibe'' of the original my little pony. So I think mostly nostalgia,vibes and little bit of tiredness is my guess.
5754807
G5 is really slow-burn. Instead full seasons of 20 minute episodes, with months between seasons, we have short 5 minute slice of life vignettes on a very loose schedule, with the actual story taking place in 5-episode seasons months apart.
You might say G5 is quality over quantity, but only in the CGI quality. The story slowly trickling out isn't any more mind-blowing than G4 ever was. But it's still good.
And I'll kick the ass of anyone who says the new ponies aren't every bit as lovable as the old Mane 6. Including background ponies and the milf and dilf.
5754810
Sounds like episode per cigarette pause in job, I'll give it a try since I don't really have time to watch what I missed of g4.
5754805
I'd say a lot can be done, but it requires some work. G4 is easier to work with, so yeah, it just kinda clicks, I guess.
5754806
Considering how broken deviantart was when I left it, I find it hard to believe.
5754807
The movie is fine, the animated series' art style seems a bit unpalatable for me.
5754810
I like the characters too, but yeah, the plot isn't all that gripping (but then, this is what fanfic writers are for).
5754814
Yup that's what I thought with vibes are off.
5754814
Broken as in not working or broken as in something else?
5754863
Last time I checked, it was a wretched hive of scum, villainy, NFTs, and AI. Also, almost every design change I remember since 2007 was for the worse.
So it's autism?
5754873
That's not consistent with my experience of the site. I've generally found it to be quite a friendly place.
I have to say, while I generally don't like the Cal Arts animation style myself (I could never take Adventure Time or Regular Show seriously because of how they looked), the Tell Your Tale art style has really grown on me and I find it quite charming. The series itself is a hot mess, but the art style lends itself quite comfortably to that.
5754901
The thing is, I liked the movie so much that everything else looks like a downgrade, so maybe there's that.
Judging by the amount of... um... NSFW content for both... G4 still seems to generate 80-90% of the traffic, so... yeah
Honestly though... does that surprise anyone? The quality of 3D content has been decreasing since the movie came out. And TYT? Given its format, it's tough to write any decent episode.
People prefer to draw and write about stuff they enjoy. Many more people still enjoy G4 more than G5, thus the result. It's sad, but... such is life
.
Separating the generations from being "dead" and "alive" isn't something I like to think about, but really, things as a whole worked out well so far. And to be fair, quite a few artists have been staying to keep it up.
Also, if you ask me, real science should also contain charts about how data changed over time.
Anywho, I say don't be sad of its weaknesses, be glad it happened. That's all I have to say about stuff like these.
Onwards!
5754921
Indeed. Also, it seems G4 was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon and everything after it has a tough time. Really hard to live up to it.
5755038
There's probably a spike in screencap percentage after every new episode. Also, I'm not sure screencapping whole episodes was a thing in early G4 (wiki does have galleries for every episode, but maybe not all of them were uploaded to derpi).
Still, the real problem isn't the amount of screencaps, but rather the absence of actual G5 fanart. There are some artists that do a good job with it (Maren springs to mind), but it's really sad when you want to find some art of the character and all you get are rows of screencaps.
I personally like G5 a lot. I've enjoyed the characters as much G4 if not more. I feel they did a great job with Misty. The graphics for Make your mark are getting closer to the movie level. I really do like the 3D characters models. There just so darn fuzzy. Even Tell Your Tale has gotten pretty good, it nothing else good for a laugh. Alicorn Sunny episodes are really good in Tell You Tale. I know Gen 5 isn't as popular as Gen 4. But it still pretty good. Or it's gotten a lot better.
To really understand G5's problem, one needs to look at the movie vs. MYM; they have very similar visuals and audio, but are a world apart in terms of writing. So...how'd that happen? One only needs to look at the single person who was kept between the G5 movie and MYM (and made lead writer on the latter): GM Berrow. What did she do before G5? She wrote MLP books that were aimed at 5 year olds and had nothing remotely intense in them, and occasionally wrote somewhat bad FiM episodes that didn't mesh with the series as a whole (The One Where Pinkie Pie Knows, The End in Friend, The Point of No Return).
TYT isn't directly controlled by GM Berrow, and as a result actually generally has more moments with a bit of actual humor or conflict to them, but it's ultimately considered subservient so far in how it's run (MYM is the horse that calls the shots and gets fed the apples, TYT is the bird that hangs from its tail and hopes to be able to eat seeds out of the horseapples), and there's likely a pretty serious set of censors ready to ensure it never goes full FiM. It's not dead yet, note, as MYM is being killed off while TYT is getting longer-format episodes; this could revitalize it because then G5 as a whole isn't dictated by a bad book writer trying to make everything palatable for toddlers...or it could just turn Misty being gassy into a 10 minute thing amidst laughable villain conflicts, but that's for us to find out in a year.
5755477
Oh yeah, I forgot about Berrow's involvement. Of all the people from the FiM crew they had to settle on Karen Traviss of MLP.
Well, Misty Can't Catch a Break is a thing for a reason. Yet another thing that curbed my G5 enthusiasm.
5755512
I think GM Berrow is far less controversial than Karen Traviss, but certainly is not many's people favorite writer. She simply makes things dull, not severely broken.
A better analogy would be that she is the David Benioff of MLP; an unremarkable writer who gets given the reins simply because they are easy to control, and then makes the project rot ridiculously by negligently just doing what's required to get a paycheck and move on.
ffmpeg -r 1 -i "My Little Pony： Tell Your Tale 🦄 S1 E68 ｜ Crystal Ball ｜ Full Episode MLP G5 Children's Cartoon.mp4" -r 1 "$filename%03d.png"Now, I am sure I could make a simple little Python Pil script that looks for the right color combinations, tags the specific ponies that match those combinations, make it safe, and then just dump 7607 (the frame count of the latest ep) to Derpi using their API.
It would be a spectacular way to get myself banned, at least.
5756258
Definitely a spectacular way to give derpi mods a hell of a headache.
5756260 Their only rule is an image needs three tags to be legit, and one must be rating.
Safe, Tell Your Tale, G5Easy! Uploads go BRRRRTTTT!
5756262
RIP mods...
My main problem with G5 is that there's so much potential in the characters and the little glimpses we've had of the setting, but the show(s) almost invariably choose the dumbest and least interesting answer, when they bother giving an answer.
Splitting things between two shows was also a mistake. MYM suffers from insufficient budget, leading to a lack of exploration and new vistas, and stuff like the dragons using painfully obvious pony rigging and thus looking like ass; and TYT with far more affordable conventional animation style is crippled by the five-minute episodes, meaning there's no room to develop any kind of story. The complete lack of coordination between the two shows, the flattening of various characters (Pipp, surprisingly, comes off the best here, but that may be because she had the weakest characterization in the movie, so the impact isn't as obvious), and the obnoxious nature of Sparky do not help.
I want to like G5! The original movie was actually very nice, and looked gorgeous! But the rest of the official material is mostly mediocre to bad, with occasional glimpses of good stuff. There's a ton of potential for a rewrite of the whole thing, but it would be a huge amount of work and I doubt the returns of interest from the readers would be worth it.
5758332
My thoughts exactly. Pretty much every time I write G5, it's based mostly on the movie. I don't care much about the rest of G5 stuff.