/rant

Hey guys. I know that this topic has been beaten to death over the last couple of years but I have a school assignment that makes me critique a visual text and the Derpy incident is perfect for it. We all know about the Derpy incident right? If not then I’ll be explaining it and my point of view on it. Here's a video I have comparing the original and modified clips. Notice the derpy eyes, voice, and script change from one to the other. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3jPtoO_FQU)

In January of 2012 the My Little Pony TV show aired the fourteenth episode of their second season. It was met with outcries of insensitivity from parents. Alas! Two minutes into the episode, just after the theme song, there was a pony with derpy eyes. And as this is an internet fandom we all know that derpy eyes is synonomous with cross eyes. “How insensitive of the show creators to have a pony with derpy eyes,” they cried. “What horrible people they are, they even named the poor pony Derpy. Fix it,” they screamed.

Now before I say what Hasbro did about this let's get a bit of background about who Derpy is and what she means to us as a fandom. Derpy is a rare phenomenon as a fan-made character that was added to the show. Now I say fan-made but no fan went out made a grey pony with a blond mane and derpy eyes and tries to get it into the show. It's even better than that. The first time derpy was seen in the show she was just a background extra and a render glitch had her with crossed eyes. The fans at the time loved the idea of the pony and named her Derpy becasue of her crossed eyes. The shows creators became aware of the fandoms response to "Derpy" and started putting her in varous background scenes doing strange things (like popping her head out of a flower pot) or messing something up (like dropping a piano on another pony's head) and Derpy became an unofficial show character in the eyes of the fans. The episode in question here was the creators first time directly acknowledging the existence of Derpy, even giving her the name we the fans gave.

Now that you know what Derpy is and have an idea of what she means lets be back to Hasbro's response.

Hasbro’s response was knee jerk and severe. They de-derped the eyes, removed the name from the script, and even re-voiced the character to make it sound a bit less offensive. While I understand that keeping the name Derpy and making the voice muddled could offend someone, they had no reason to change the eyes. When the parents cried out they cried out that the derpy eyed pony was being made fun of. Some may even have cried out against the derpy eyed pony even being there, although they were the insensitive ones. Having the pony named derpy and giving the pony a bad voice can definitely be seen as making fun of a disabled person but they should not have de-derped the pony. The shows themes are about friendship and rejecting this pony is the opposite of that.

All Hasbro should have done was get rid of the name and voice, which they did, while keeping the derpy eyes to maintain the integrity and themes of the show. How the main cast interacted with Derpy (renamed Ditzy) would have expanded on how they looked at friendship and chose to intereact with other different types of ponies in the future. Having the derpy eyed pony there and accepting them is part of what’s shown in that clip and that should have been kept. To this day Derpy can still be found in the backgrounds of various scenes in the show but whe's much harder to spot and shown less often.

(Sorry about bringing the incident back up guys but this was just the perfect topic for this assignment.)