A Pony For Your Thoughts Ep. 1

MLP: Nothing To Do With Ponies
or
Why My Little Pony Is A Big Success With Males

Hello and welcome all, to my first opinion piece on MLP: FIM. My Name is Brog Scéal, but you may all call me by my brony name, a direct translation of my real name, Shoe Story. A quick bit of back-story. I am a farrier. This is someone who shoe's horses for a living. I am a resident of Canada, or to be more specific, the Yukon, though I am currently living in Newfoundland. I be awesome. That's really all you need to know for the moment. So, on to the good stuff. Today I'll be talking about the massive, cross market, success of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic. Mainly, why do so many males like a show admittedly aimed at, and marketed to, girls aged between 5-12? To answer this question we have to ask a different question first. What do you give 5-12 year old girls if you want them to watch your show? In 1986 the answer seemed self evident. You give them cutesy anthropomorphic ponies and fairy princess magic and tea-parties. Now though? In the year 2010 when we consider ourselves enlightened and equality reigns? When parents can easily provide their children with any kind of entertainment they deem fit for them via the miracle of the internet? Well, cutesy junk-food shows just weren't gonna cut it.

In 2006 the last truly well received My Little Pony movie was released under the title Princess Promenade. Now at time of writing I have been unable to attain a copy but from a collection of youtube clips and the wiki article I have pieced together a good idea of the story, and how it went. All I have for it is a resounding meh. Anyway, a few years later a visionary woman and long time My Little Pony fan by the name of Lauren Faust went to Hasbro with a pitch for a mini series called Milky Way and the Galaxy Girls. This pitch eventually went through the company and found it's way into the hands of another, if not visionary, then at least brilliant sales woman by the name of Lisa Licht. Mrs. Licht was hired by Hasbro in 2007 as General Manager of Entertainment and Licensing. Press releases following the announcement stated that basically she was being brought on to expand on, and find a way to resell, toy lines that had long since become irrelevant. Previously Mrs. Licht worked for Mattel managing the barbie doll line. This was right in her wheel house. Upon receiving this pitch from Mrs. Faust, Licht quickly recognized a woman with a talent for characterizing highly marketable characters and decided to approach Mrs. Faust with the idea of a My Little Pony reboot. This is quite possibly the only good thing to come from Micheal Bay getting his hands on the transformers series. See, while I do abhor everything Mr. Bay has done with Transformers, there is no arguing that his re-imagining of the series has been hugely successful. This success inspired Mrs. Licht to push for similar pairings of out of date franchises in need of reboot and the proper, “creative stewards” as she put it, to make them relevant again. And so a holy union of talent and business was born. “But Shoe” you ask, “What does this have to do with why we all love MLP: FIM?” Well I was just getting to that. You see, as I mentioned before, Mrs. Faust has had a long standing love of the series. What I didn't mention is Mrs.Faust, in making this project, stated that she wanted to make quality entertainment for girls but didn't want to contribute to the garbage generally targeted at them. Most shows aimed at girls are overly bright, garish, boring, and plagued with waaaaaayyyyyyy to much pink.

So here's where we get into the nitty-gritty. See, many shows out there targeted at young people fall into the trap of narrative driven characters, as opposed to character driven narrative. Don't worry not as hard to understand as it seems. Basically it goes like this. In a story where characters are driven by narrative, there is an overarching problem and a single solution and the only thing that changes based on the characters is how they get from point A to point B. This is a perfectly acceptable way to approach a story if it is a simple one shot thing, like a movie, say for example the new mission impossible. There's a guy trying to launch a bomb, only way to stop it is to get the launch codes. Cast of characters could be tom cruise, and Simon Pegg, but they could just as easily be Scooby Doo, and Shaggy. Over arching story wouldn't change. Just how they got from A to B. This is almost universally suicide for an on-going narrative. Especially one in which your main objective is to market the individual characters rather than the story it's self. In a character driven narrative however, the story is a result of problems caused by the characters own personalities. This is the best way to tell stories if you want to be able to infinitely reuse the characters. More importantly it forces you to create full fleshed out characters with flaws and relationships, otherwise you have no conflict, and hence no story. Think of The Simpsons. Easily the longest running cartoon on T.V. Every single episode in this series is based on the actions of one cartoon family, but its managed to stay running for years because it never gets old. The story never has to stop. This is because almost every conflict in the series is caused by the characters, their flaws,and their decisions. My Little Pony: FIM also does a great job of this. Every episode begins with a problem that is the direct result of someones personality. Like applejack being to stubborn to accept help with a job she clearly couldn't handle alone, or Twilight's unwillingness to listen to Pinky when the parasprites invade because she assumes that Pinky hasn't anything worth listening to. In and of it's self, this may not seem like it creates an inherently better story, and it doesn't, but what it does create is better characters. By necessity at the end of the story the characters have to learn or grow to some degree. It forces well-rounded, dynamic characters, which are much easier to care about.

Now here comes the second reason why men like My Little Pony. Actually let me amend that. This is the only explanation for why ANYONE likes MLP. The previous explanation was just why My Little Pony was good. Men like MLP, because MLP IS GOOD! That's really all there is to it guys. Okay, Okay, I'll try to dig a little deeper for you. See this is where it gets a bit harder. You are thinking of ponies as inherently feminine, but this really isn't true. It's actually a fairly new idea, and kind of a silly one. For thousands of years riding horses was not only an incredibly masculine activity, but also a symbol of nobility and wealth. Masculine because of the importance of horses in combat for millenia, and a sign of nobility largely because of the expense and skill required for breeding and keeping quality horses. They were a status symbol. Recently however they stopped being looked at as a tool and became more focused on as a pet, which slowly caused a shift in our understanding of horses as a sign of wealth and power, to more of a creature to love and care for, previously a purely maternal duty. Hence our modern mind-set that horses are for girls. Really ponies are just that, ponies. Gender neutral. In this case the ponies barely have anything to do with ponies at all anyway. They are basically just horse shaped people. Almost nothing about the stories would change if I were to replace all the characters with say talking cars, or robots, or vegetables for that matter. The story isn't really driven by the idea of ponies doing things in the first place. It's more things are being done, and made cuter, and more seemingly sincere by the fact its ponies doing them. Honestly guys and girls, that's the big secret. You like My Little Pony, because My Little Pony is good. It's that easy.

Next time, Why Don't You Love Us Any More Lauren or Season Two Sucks. Until then, I'm Shoe Story, and this has been, A Pony For Your Thoughts.