Dragon-Dog Day Afternoon: why? · 1:10pm Aug 20th, 2013
I haven't done a pointless Writer's Workshop in a while (although this isn't going to be much of one, I can see that coming already -- my insomnia is upon me again, which may be the ultimate reason why this story got out) and thought everyone might need to catch up on their sleep. So on the count of three, pull your favorite blanket out of the closet and Cue The Delta Waves.
This story had three triggers.
First, the obvious one: I finally got around to watching Equestria Girls. And yes, I stalled. Part of that was because I had a light dread of what it might do to Triptych, at least in the sense of Stuff I'm Gonna Have To Ignore. (For purposes of that story, every episode in the first three seasons happened. Everything after -- well, it's not like I'm going to be finished before the season premiere, but you get the idea.) I didn't want any dark subconscious influences.
Or at least that was a really good excuse at the time. One which held up for two weeks.
It may be at least equally realistic to say I was living in slight dread of the back cover.
I won't go into the story, the alternate world, or most of the movie at all because a thousand and more blog entries beat me to it and you're all probably sick of it, except to note three points.
1. Vice-principal Luna? Seriously?
2. To me, the single biggest cringe moment in the entire film (and there are choices to be made) is when Twilight tries to tell Flash Sentry that just because she said no doesn't mean she meant no. In pretty much those words.
*megacringe*
Yeah, there's a lesson we want to teach the kids in the audience... Somewhere in that is a Twilight Finally Consults A @#$% Dictionary story, but I'm not sure I want it. There had to be a better way to play that scene. There wouldn't have been many worse.
3. Dragon-dog.
I know how the rules work, or the story tropes which often become those rules. Animated movie with female lead = cute animal somewhere in the vicinity. But dear sweet pony gawds, this was Spike. What exactly are we trying to say about the relationship here? I'd already made a story comment about having him sleep in that basket. What's next, chew toys? Squeakies? Are we saying Equestria's Stupidest Vet is now in the right? Sure, the trope-rules say cute animal is mandatory. But didn't Fluttershy have an extra to loan out?
(Note that in this alternate world, Angel remains Angel. Pity. A human could have been punched in the face.)
Trigger the second: I saw the Equestria Girls toys and successfully held onto my sanity, although I freely admit to openly saying "What the buck?" in the middle of the department store. Sitting nearby was the Pinkie Pie's Boutique set.
No, that part of the story was not a joke.
Seriously. Boutique. The toy purse was real too.
In Pinkie's defense, it's not exactly easy to manage that level of curls.
And the final trigger pull was an article I saw a few months ago, one which describes exactly what the character of Don Brinker does -- because there's a script consultant pulling this trick in real life. He gets paid for showing up and making stories follow whatever he sees the rules as being. The checks are not huge by Hollywood standards. They're not small, either. The arguably-darkest part of the coverage noted that the only people who really seemed to have a problem with this were the writers. And since writers in Hollywood rank below absolutely everything else and yes, that includes pond scum, no one of importance therefore cared.
(The article: .Creativity Kill Approach at your own nausea risk. And remember the golden rule of Hollywood: no one knows anything. William Goldman said it and no one's proved him wrong yet.)
So I watched the film. And my trigger finger, probably in an attempt to save my sanity via distraction, kept rotating the chambers. Who made this decision? Best-case, maybe it was someone outside the main team... What would Spike even think of this if he knew what was being done to him?
I just barely got through spotting that very last cameo in the credits scroll before opening the composition program.
So having successfully put everyone into their own nightscapes while working out a few personal pieces of horror, three random notes:
* 'The dragon' gets pretty meta in this. I think I was working more with the idea of the character having awareness of his own status more than I was Spike himself.
* If you've ever seen the MLP:FIM team gathered with all crew and voice actresses present, you might have noticed that there are a lot of blondes in the group. That room represents a hair color statistical hiccup. Actually, it's more of a coughing fit.
* There may currently be only one script assassin for hire, but there are Don Brinkers all over the industry. Should you ever find yourself in the presence of one? Run.
Actually, try to hurt them as much as possible. Then run.
Oh geez, I didn't even catch that. That is pretty bad.
Honestly, I actually quite enjoyed the movie, if only because I had fun picking it apart and pointing out all the plot holes.
The main purpose of Spike in the regular cartoon (and the movie) is so Twilight is not talking to herself. Because that would show her as crazy. er.
And vice-principal for Luna? No, that's obviously Molestia's job. I mean Celestia.
For a kiddie cartoon designed to sell dress-up dolls to 8-year old girls, it wasn't too bad. In my opinion, the best movie script they could get is if they took all the writers and storyboard artists, locked them in a room with unlimited booze, and said "20 million dollars. 66 minutes run time. Go nuts. See you in a week." Heck, they might get three or four scripts (with only one being readable :)
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I caught that one. It still bugs me, a little.
OTOH, I can't get *too* worked up about Dog!Spike, since even under the guidance of Mighty Faust Spike sleeps in a little basket on the floor in Twilight's room while Twilight has a full-size bed; *and*, canonically, a spare full-sized bed for sleepover purposes that's usually going spare. I know people play up the brother angle, and I like the vibe... but brother or not, he more or less acts like Twilight's talking dog.
Which is okay, because some people are just like that.
From what we have learned from the crew answering questions, a lot of reactions to the whole "Make them humans" thing was a loud "Wait what!?".
But, this is Hasbro. The same company that forced a couple of their writers to swear off writing for cartoons ever again because of insane requests for script changes. (I believe it was the two Beast Wars writers from way back when).
In the end, toy advertisement will be crushed out no matter what the actual crew wants. But the core of the characters will stick around, show or not.
I haven't seen the movie yet and I was wondering if you'd answer a question for me. I've seen a couple of other writers' blog posts about it, but that was long enough ago that I would feel awkward posting a new comment on them. So, since you're the first person I follow who has posted about the movie since I thought of this, I would like to ask you something.
If I understand the plot summary correctly, Twilight had to win prom/homecoming/whatever queen in order to get the crown back from Principal Celestia. Sunset Shimmer did some creative sabotage along the way, like taping Twilight acting like a pony, but with the help of her five friends, Twilight wins.
Was there a reason given for why Twilight had to run for the thingy instead of, say, Rarity? The main characters are all fairly charismatic and competent, so it seems unlikely they'd be horribly unpopular. Seems like it'd be easier to start a campaign for a well known girl, rather than some really weird newcomer. They were all helping Twilight try to win, so it's not like they didn't believe her. If one of them won they'd have been happy to fork over the crown.
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The Plot Said So.
...not good enough?
The arguable major one is that Sunset Shimmer has been running unopposed, and the movie makes it feel like that's been status quo for a while. None of the other students, Alt-Manes included, will make the effort to go up against her because they know it's pointless and SS has been expending a lot of energy to keep them feeling that way. Any chance for someone to get a campaign organized is sabotaged, all attempts at self-esteem are stomped out. The rest of the school is firmly at the 'why bother?' stage of depression. Twilight's the only character who doesn't know what she's getting into -- which makes her the lone pony who still believes it has a chance to work.
There's also a subplot of the Alt-Manes being connected to their cliques instead of each other. Alt-Rarity has popularity -- with the artist crowd. But she can't rally the other groups. Her Ponyville counterpart's social web doesn't exist here, and that leaves her isolated. At best, she can gather her clique's worth of votes -- no more. The group isn't capable of reuniting itself and promoting a single candidate from among those five. But with Twilight to get them together, they're connected to enough of the school for a rally on her behalf. Also a musical number combined with a chance for Rarity to clear out some old stock.
At least that's how I'm seeing it. Anything beyond that from me might be venturing into Plot Spackle.
I haven't seen the movie yet, but I plan on watching the whole thing next weekend.
the recent small bits (in various places) of anger I have been seeing about Celestia being tyrannical, or maybe that was just some trolls, has led me to believe that the movie has something about celestia being dictator-ish.if that is the case then I would say that most dictators have a likeable person allied with them to keep the public happy