Boycott Hasbro? · 7:24am Jan 10th, 2014
I sense a diminishing enthusiasm among the herd as season 3 turns into season 4. There are still new users on fimfiction, but the rate of departure is pretty high too. Some bronies have been griping for years that Hasbro is ignoring the brony demographic by being careless about characters, continuity, and logic, approving (or demanding) material that assumes their audience is too dumb to care about anything except pretty princess wings.
I wouldn't say that's focusing on the 6-year-old demographic. 6-year-olds are smarter than that. It sounds more like focusing on the deviantart demographic. But I've assumed that Hasbro knows what it's doing. It would be a shame if the show deteriorated into just another show for little girls. But it would be more of a shame if it were cancelled due to poor ratings and low pony figurine sales figures. So that means continuing to cater to 6-year-old girls, right? Hasbro thinks so. And Hasbro must know what it's doing.
But back up. Lauren Faust is the one who really knew what she was doing, and Hasbro (from what rumors I've heard--nothing special; you can find them online) let her go rather than let her run the show the way she wanted.
Maybe Hasbro isn't all-wise and all-knowing.
Nielsen says that little girls outnumber bronies:
But Nielsen doesn't count internet viewers. What percentage of bronies watch MLP via the internet? According to my unscientific observation, approximately 100%.
Just how many bronies are there? Some extrapolation from this survey concluded there are about 10 million bronies.
How many little American girls ages 2-11 are there? We don't have those numbers exactly, but it's probably very close to the number of little girls age 0-9, which according to the US Census Bureau is about 20 million.
Do half of those girls watch My Little Pony? I really don't think so.
And how much money do those little girls spend on pony swag? Do they possibly have less disposable income than bronies in their twenties and thirties?
Possibly.
It seems possible that (a) there are more bronies than little girls watching MLP, and (b) they spend more money on MLP swag per person. And that's not counting what bronies spend buying ponies for their 2-11 year-old nieces. Bronies might spend most of the money Hasbro makes from MLP.
Or they might, if Hasbro sold things like this:
instead of things like this:
So it seems possible that MLP will lose its brony audience, lose money, and be cancelled, as a result of focusing on what they imagine 6-year-old girls want.
(Personally, I think whether the audience is bronies or 6 to 10-year olds isn't so important. Kids are smart enough to notice that Twilight suddenly has a brother, or that Luna started talking funny. It disturbs them more than it disturbs bronies. Try giving a 6-year-old who watches the show a Celestia plushie with a pink mane if you want to see true nerd rage. But I digress.)
How can we prevent this?
I think Hasbro has no clue what fraction of their sales are to bronies. And I'm curious. So how can we find out, and tell them, what percentage of pony product sales come from bronies?
By not buying stuff for a month.
This would have to be a carefully-selected month. Someone would have to know when Hasbro's accounting periods start and stop, and which months are too unusual to be candidates. Possibly Hasbro would be interested enough in the data to cooperate.
Is that a crazy idea? What do you think?
ADDED: I didn't mean all Hasbro products, just pony. Horsemumbler's idea--defer pony purchases for one month, then everyone buy something the next month--is better. I think Bookworm Scatterseed's idea, to pick one month and everybody buy something, with no boycott, is even better. But Titanium Dragon makes some good points about why it might not be a good thing if Hasbro did target bronies more.
CONCLUSION: It would be bad to boycott just to make a point, but without even having any recommended actions for Hasbro to take as a result. Brony-buy-pony month would be a better option if we just want to show our numbers.
You're spot on about deviant art. One of the staffers said they came up with EG by looking at humanized fan art (and then proceeded to make the worst humanizations I've ever seen, even including drawfriend training grounds). Clearly they just wanted to compete with monster high. I don't trust hasbro to make smart decisions, or even the most profitable decisions anymore.
I think that might send the exact opposite of the message we want to send.
A better idea might be, instead of a boycott, we pick a month when all us bronies buy at least one piece of MLP merch might send a clearer and more positive signal.
Not that Hasbro has its head sufficiently outside its own plot to notice, though...
1701606
When given a choice, Hasbro will never fail to make the wrong decision.
Eh. I think Hasbro knows down to the tenth of a percent what dollar amount of their sales goes to what age bracket. There's just a few market forces that cause issues with long-term planning. Fads tend to explode into being, then fade away (see Rock, Pet) and sometimes attempting to attract adult customers can chase them away. One of the attractions that MLP has always had is that young girls who play with cute little plastic ponies turn into young women with little girls who they buy cute little plastic ponies, making a very broad base as they turn into grandparents. Markets can crater if a trend goes to heck; an example of such would be if just one single creep who gets national attention doing something disgusting were to state their love of ponies. The press will pounce on even the tiniest thing and turn it into Armageddon, before dropping it like a rock to chase their next squirrel. That's why I don't think Hasbro will pay for a fifth season of MLP unless the sales figures maintain a constant and upward trend, which an embargo might threaten.
So no, I don't think it's a good idea.
See the problem isn't so much what six year old girls want, it's about what Hasbro's stock-holders think six year old girls want. Going after a different audience would be too much of a risk for them, so they end up just chasing trends. Though I have high hopes for Rainbooms, the Hunger Games inspired spin-off show that they're giving Rainbow Dash.
But really, if you want to change what products Hasbro sells, buy up a bunch of their stock, then strong-arm them into catering to us the same way they do Star Wars and Marvel. Force them to stop watering down the market with rip offs of Monster High.
Hasbro weaves drunkenly between brilliant and stupid. There are some very smart forward-thinkers managing certain aspects, and some very conventional and conservative people managing certain others.
If Hasbro was all stupid, they would have managed to hamfistedly crush Brony in 2010. A conventional IP and message-control strategy would dictate that they should have shut down the youtube uploads and shut down any fanworks that even remotely looked like it might infringe on their 'core' interests--which would mean all the plushmakers and sculptors at a minimum, and possibly further than that. Their outsourced licensing strategy has also been very well-executed.
The heart of incompetence at Hasbro has been, ironically, the toy design department itself. This is where all the problems emerge from. Toy design focus groups dictate that they need a pretty pink princess. Toy design focus groups dictate that all princesses must be pretty alicorns. The toy designers they actually employ (as opposed to the ones working under license, who have been turning out brilliant stuff) trudge in the same lock-step pattern as if they didn't have a show to work from at all.
MLP used to be a toy line that they periodically produced 22-minute animated commercials for. Now it's a real show, with a toy line. Everyone at Hasbro seems to have noticed the reversal except for the actual toy design department. Unfortunately, since Hasbro is still a toy company first, that department has the organizational clout to keep barreling ahead.
However, I must point out that it's unfair to use that last picture. Those are Gen 3.5 toys, designed and produced at the height of the horror before FiM. They haven't been made more or less since the show started. If you find those on your store shelves, you may want to ask yourself what in god's name that store is doing with toys that have been out of production for three or four years.
I think I'm a departure at this point. Season one was great, season two was good, season three was boring, and I haven't felt any need to watch season four. I no longer encourage people to watch the show. I no longer read stories I'm tracking as they're updated. I haven't picked up a new story in quite a while. I'm hanging around the site mostly to watch for good stories to finish.
It's sad. These things never last. This one hadn't even hit its expiration date. There were at least two seasons of 'great' in the talent and ideas behind MLP:FiM, and another two of 'good'. Maybe there was more than that. The things needed to stretch it that far would've taken the execs out of their comfort zone, though. Hasbro is full of old people who think they understand kids. It's a fossil.
1701607
This is the right idea. A sudden temporary income boost would make them sit up and notice. A sudden income drop, even if it's also temporary, would make them spontaneously lose twenty IQ points and blame us for the death of all good things everywhere. Suits can get irrational about sales made and lost.
Let me lead by saying what I always say when people start wondering why Hasbro isn't paying any attention to us.
Bronies have been around for three years or so. My Little Pony has been around for twenty years. Bronies will have, in all likelihood, peaked and declined in three more years. Hasbro wants My Little Pony to still be around in twenty more years.
That's why they're still catering to little girls (and, with EqG, slightly older little girls). Even if we outnumber them now, we probably won't for all that long, and they really don't want to drive away their primary audience. Whether their current business plan will actually maintain that audience, however, is a different discussion (I'd guess no; traditional toys, or at least toy companies like Hasbro, aren't all that far behind newspapers in being made obsolete). Stuff like Unicon, Fighting is Magic, and the plethora of pirating doesn't endear us to them, either.
As to the show in particular, though, I don't think they really care if it get's cancelled. Anything we get past season three is just extra blood from the stone; they see it as a commercial first and foremost. Kids don't really care about show accuracy in their toys, either (or at least we didn't when I was a kid - I had some weird ass Spiderman toys that never appeared in any official media).
1701607
1701619
1701630
How about both?
Organize a boycott for one month, then have every brony buy at least one piece of merch the next. That would make the message unmistakable, and the cash carrot might assuage the sting of that nasty, thwappy stick.
Don't buy much things anyway. Sure.
1701628
I agree that it's mostly the toy designers that make the wacko ideas for the more oddball merch. We've seen some nice stuff in the molded ponies, with everything else being so-so to lacking, but it does seem to be getting better over time, with the occasional 'huh?' hiccup like goth Pinkie.
1701630
You getting bored is a personal problem, not the show's.
1701630
Something about that makes me feel profoundly sad, Causal. Perhaps that shows I'm naive in the ways of fandoms, having never been in one before.
I don't know a whole lot about the animation industry, but I'm actually expecting a full-order season five and an abbreviated season six, mirroring what we got for the first three, after which I suspect they'll call it quits. My (admittedly spotty) understanding is that syndication for animated kids television shows historically comes in 65-show blocks, which breaks neatly into two 26-epsiode seasons and one 13-episode season. Obviously, I don't think "seasons" have been too much of a concern for most animated kids shows in the past; but this is the best explanation I've heard for doing a 13-episode third season (that, and needing time to develop and execute Equestria Girls).
I've noticed considerable drop-off in fan engagement, too. Anecdotally, it seems like almost everyone I talk to isn't watching Season 4. I'm a little annoyed by this, personally, because (1) I was always late to this party, and it sucks that I feel like I'm pretty much the only person on the upswing, and (2) I've actually enjoyed most of Season 3 and Season 4. Season 3 had two episodes I thought were top-notch, a number I consider solid, and only two or three I really dislike. That's probably about on par with Season 1 and a little behind Season 2, for me anyway. Season 4 hasn't had any truly great episodes yet, in my mind, but it's had a number that I've enjoyed and only one I really feel let down by.
I know this is heresy around these parts, but I'm not actually sure I like the Lauren Faust stuff that much. She wrote a great character bible, yes, but I'm not at all sure that (again, in my opinion) her presence and her ideas were helping the quality of the show much in the first season. Would I rather have her than Dave Polsky? Sure—but I'd take a number of Fimfiction authors over Dave Polsky, too. (You wanna know why Season 2 was good? Go look at the writing credits.)
The toys just don't have much impact on me, except inasmuch as Hasbro wants them pitched with the show. But I quite like the Crystal Empire, and I'm even okay with Princess Cotton Candy. It'd be nice if the toys matched the show better, but I don't know that I'd be a whole lot more likely to buy them in any case.
I don't particularly know what Hasbro is supposed to do with this thing, though. The fandom was always somewhat liable to burn itself out, I think—it seems like it's about the zeitgeist and not just the show. There's not quite as much need for pony as there was in 2010, and so I think it's lost some of its luster in peoples' eyes. On the other hand, I need pony, which is perhaps why I'm still plenty attached. I think it's smart of them to have spent much of Season 4 exploring the setting a little more: the Everfree, Manehattan, *gulp* wherever the Ahuizotl stuff happens. I don't know how much it's really taking hold with the fandom, but more setting and more characters basically means more 'toys' for those of us who like to tell stories. I don't know what else they're really supposed to do for us.
1701689
Nah, me getting bored could be either. Might even be neither. Boredom happens. People getting upset about people getting bored is a personal problem. That's a rabbit hole of bad feelings which turns 'boredom' into 'hatred'. It's best not to answer complaints with complaints. Now, arguments that the show is better than I thought, that I'm definitely up for hearing.
It's not like I WANT to be bored and departed.
1701696
I regret making you sad. Pony is my first one too. I've watched a number of them curiously from afar, though. Just because I'm bored now doesn't mean it's bad memories or even sad ones. I still rewatch the first two seasons, I've even reread a number of the fanfics on my favorites list. I've read your three stories five times each.
1701711
Ooh, wait till you get to see the new one!
(Sorry, 1701696 !)
Also, this may be somewhat relevant to the whole "Whose problem is it" discussion, and I love posting XKCD whenever it's even remotely apropos.
imgs.xkcd.com/comics/photos.png
Ponies: nature's sunsets.
1701711
Well considering that you say that you haven't seen any of season 4 yet, you might want to start there. As for boredom, yes it does happen. It happens no matter if something is good or not, other things come up and grab our attention, hence my assertion that it's you. The community is still strong, even if it's not growing at the rate it was before.
As for 'people getting upset about people getting bored', that's a pet peeve of mine born from having played WoW since the beginning and continuing to enjoy it, while being bombarded with people decrying the state of the game, not because it is bad, but because they got bored and have to justify it somehow. Having personal feelings projected onto the entirety of either community just bothers me.
1701624
Buying Hasbro stock might be a bit hard. It's increase massively in the past few years and is over $50 a share. It's so hard to buy it when there's other things to buy just right there. It's so expensive...
If I were to boycott Hasbro for the sake of MLP, does that mean I can't buy any Magic: the Gathering packs? It's owned by Wizards of the Coast, who's owned by Hasbro. Or would that be noted separately on their reports? I'm not gonna lie, I drop $400-$500 each new set that comes out and Born of the Gods comes out in February. And damn it's going to be awesome (gotta love the newly opened pack smell. It's gotta be the ink... Or the varnish)
Hooray disposable income yeah!
I don't buy too much mlp stuff. Usually blind bags or vinyl figures and usually months apart... and I just forgot that they released a MLP CCG and my friends convinced me to a buy a box and all the starters. Never mind.
Crap, I spend way too much and most of it goes to Hasbro... sad face...
I don't want to get into how much I
wasam spending on Warhammer 40k. (New 'Nids coming up. Buy all the Harpies.)Anyone else have a an addiction to buying shit they'll never need in the hopes of satiating some deep seated issue that's completely unrelated?
Restraint is an issue in regards to boycotting. I ain't got none :) (I just tell myself I help the economy. It works too well)
Anyone notice the quality in Brony music going down in the past year? It started for me around when "Lost on the Moon" came out. Next one I added to my playlist was "Boo Hoo" a few months later. I used to add so much more catchy beats to my playlist. There just aren't many new songs catching my attention nowadays. The latest I added was that Trixie song by Psychgoth. Is there a lack of enthusiasm and inspiration to make good music? Something else?
In Hasbro's defense they do have a steep learning curve. I mean letting go of the mastermind behind Foster's Home and Power Puff Girls? I don't know, I'll take it for what it is, considering all the other garbage cartoons nowadays. With the exception of the Power Ponies episode season four has been decent. Although it is kind of sad when fans can make better episodes than the producers themselves.
1701727
If you look at the site statistics widget (scroll down, it's available at the bottom of the page), the community appears to be growing FASTER than it was. It's got the same linear growth curve as it had, plus a discontinuous harvest of new users a few months ago. (There's no earthly way of knowing which direction they are going... There's no knowing where they're rowing... Or which way the river's flowing... Is it raining, is it snowing? Is a hurricane a-blowing?)
I can see how playing WoW would teach you that. For what it's worth, 'fans' who do that are one of the reasons why I've never kept an MMO subscription for long. That particular whining seemed like a memetoxin. I was worried I would 'catch' it somehow. I could already feel the frustrated desire to tell them to just walk away already. Rather than wade in, I walked away myself.
I would argue that it's not the SAME kind of dumb, but you're still right. It's dumb for me to complain of boredom without having seen the new episodes.
1701724
How can ponies be nature's sunsets? Aren't nature's sunsets nature's sunsets?
1701741
You learn to block them out, mostly at least.
I do agree that a lot of the people in charge have no idea what they're doing at this point, but we at least have a few people on our side trying to make things work. Focus groups are comedy fodder for a reason, right?
1701711
Aww, thanks. I... I wish I'd published more. I wish I'd been less intimidated by the greats that inspired me...
Wow, I sound like I'm talking from my deathbed. Fandoms do strange things to the mind.
1701741
That's cause for hope. I mean Start Trek TOS ran for only 3 seasons, right, and look how long that fandom was around for. There's hope.
And, you know, I don't want anything more for Hasbro at this point. I don't care about merch. But I like you guys, all however-many million of you there are. Sure, some of you are a bit weird, but on the balance of things you're still all pretty Celly-damned awesome, you crazy hordsmith people you.
Bah, I say.
Bronies are the reason we have season 4. We're the reason Equestria Girls was made, and why it went to actual theatres instead of direct to DVD. We're the reason there are DVD box sets. We're the target audience for the MLP comics, which are IDW's hottest seller. We're the reason there's a collectible card game. They're sending a ton of product our way.
So what if Hasbro *also* markets toward little girls, and some of the toys and marketing they come up with for that demographic is not to our tastes? As your charts show, little girls are still a very substantial part of the fanbase of the show (and they do have disposable income via their parents). I certainly won't begrudge them that. This is a show that multiple demographics can enjoy equally well.
My approach is quite straightforward. I buy MLP merchandise that appeals to me, and I don't buy MLP merchandise that doesn't appeal to me. I've picked up some spiffy reasonably-show-accurate pony figurines, and I've left the Equestria Girls dolls and the baby abomination things on the shelves. If enough people happen to share my tastes Hasbro will notice that some stuff's selling and other stuff's not; they'll adjust future production accordingly.
There's no need for a boycott. A boycott would be counterproductive because all it would do is reduce the sales of the *good* stuff. I'm already boycotting the stuff I don't like. :)
I agree their toys are shite, but don't care. I also don't care about the fact that this show will never be intelligent enough to satisfy all my sensibilities and logic. Because what it is I enjoy. For some reason. Still haven't figured out why I like it so much other than that it satisfies some need for innocent weirdness.
There are several flaws with this theory.
First off, Hasbro has only indirect control over the show; they basically order episodes, but the people who actually make the episodes is not Hasbro. Hasbro merely approves of various points in the product line, and similar things, but the writing and editing is done in the animation house; from everything we've heard, Hasbro actually doesn't interfer all that much. Sure, they are your corporate overlords, but the general statements from the cast and crew (which, quite frankly, aren't that surprising) is that in terms of day-to-day, Hasbro doesn't actually have that much direct influence over what they do.
In other words, the show being "good" or "bad" is actually pretty much entirely in the hands of the writing staff. So... it isn't Hasbro's fault if bad episodes come out, it is actually very much the animation studio's. In fact, I don't think Hasbro is equipped to deal with a "bad episode"; I don't think the animation studio knows how to deal with that either. I know from back in the 90s, Gargoyles sometimes got in episodes which were very shabby, and they had to send them back to be fixed, and sometimes they just had to leave in some very shabby animation because they had a schedule - and sometimes they had schedule slippage because the studios screwed up and were slow. And that was a show produced for the freaking Disney Channel!
Moreover, the reason Faust walked away from the show wasn't because of them interfering with her running the show - those are in fact unfounded rumors. Rather, the actual cause was stress. Running a show is very stressful, and I think the way Faust had set things up, she kind of dumped even more responsibility on herself. By her own accounts she was falling apart and she pulled out of the show because it was just too hard for her to keep working on it. That's quite the contrast to Weisman, who said outright that he didn't get to do everything he wanted to do with Gargoyles and kind of rage quit, and later regretted it because it really wasn't THAT big of a deal retrospectively.
Did Hasbro's input contribute to her stress? Very possibly, but Hasbro was certainly not the sole source of said stress. And I'll be entirely frank here - the idea that Faust actually knew what she was doing is just outright false. Hasbro is actually what made the show good, because Hasbro put major constraints on what Faust could do. Faust wanted it to be much more adventure oriented, and the adventure elements of the show are one of its weakest parts - the fact that she was forced to make it very slice-of-lifey made the show what it was, and if Faust had what she wanted, the show would not have been what it is, or nearly as good as it is. Indeed, the episode Faust wrote herself, the pilot, is very okay, but it isn't amazing, and the second half has issues - the best writer the show had was MA Larson, who is clearly a very talented man, and who wrote the only really good adventure two-parter (the Return of Harmony; Friendship is Magic is very okay, but it is fairly middling as far as the show goes, whereas Return of Harmony is well above average). Amusingly, the other good writer was Meghan McCarthy, who wrote several extremely good episodes.
The trouble Meghan has is that she has zero experience producing two-parters - none. She never had made anything longer than 22 minutes. And frankly, it shows in her adventure episode 2-parters and Equestria girls - the plot and pacing have issues. A Canterlot Wedding is all over the place, Princess Twilight Sparkle has major pacing problems in both halves (and amusingly opposite issues - the first half is too long, the second half has Twilight Sparkle making and reversing a decision in 70 seconds of screentime), and The Crystal Empire feels empty - there's some really good stuff in there, as there is in ACW, but it is spread out amongst a bunch of stuff which isn't. But her slice of life episodes were consistently good; prior to devoting herself wholly to two-parters, she had an average comparable to Larson's as far as episode strength goes.
But honestly, season 3 was pretty strong - statistically speaking, it was actually the strongest season, though it being shorter throws things off a bit, and the difference probably isn't statistically significant.
Why, then, the weakness of season four?
Well, for one thing, they're missing MA Larson and Meghan McCarthy's one-shots. Larson wrote 12 of the 65 episodes in the first three seasons, or nearly a fifth of them! In my personal ratings for the show, he wrote 3 2/5s, 3 3/5s, 4 4/5s, and 2 5/5s, for an average of 41/12 = 3.42 per episode (and notably, two of his 2/5s were in season 1, and 2/5s are still reasonable episodes). 3.42 beats every single seasonal average. The only person who had a higher average than that was Meghan McCarthy's one-shots in the first two seasons (no fewer than 3 5/5 episodes, with 3 4/5s and 2 3/5s, for an average north of 4). They're also missing McCarthy doing one shots - she got partial writing credit on Power Ponies, but that episode is listed as having three bloody writers, which suggests to me that someone screwed it up, someone ELSE screwed it up, and McCarthy ended up having to step in to rewrite it a third time.
This hurts, because you're having writers like Polsky and Williams step in, who have two of the lowest averages on the show, and they've had three episodes between them so far this season. Given the entirely reasonable assumption that Power Ponies had three writers because it had problems, that suggests that fully half of the episodes so far this season were written under less than ideal circumstances - and once you realize that McCarthy sucks at writing two-parters, that raises it to 6/8. Castle Mane-ia and Flight to the Finish are both fairly average episodes in the grand scheme of things, which is to say they're fairly good. My guess is that as the season goes on, we'll see the average rise simply because of this very feature - but that depends on what percentage of the season is two parters and written by those folks. That's not to say that they cannot write good episodes (they can and have), but that their averages are both below the show's average for the first three seasons when writing these sorts of episodes.
For another thing, I suspect they're targeting bronies. Power Ponies and Daring Don't are both brony-targeted episodes, and both are really bad. Bats is bad all on its own, but Power Ponies is just a plain old bad idea for a pony episode, and Daring Don't certainly isn't a good one. Targeting bronies is a horrible mistake, because, well, not targeting bronies is exactly what made the show good to start with.
The thing here is, and I think this is an important thing to note, the show isn't actually targeted at 8 year old girls. This... is a shocking revelation, I know, but it is so. What it is is targeted at 8 year old girls watching TV with their parents. This is, in fact, an entirely different demographic. A pure kids show - something like, say, the old Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles show - is embarassing for parents to watch. You feel stupid watching it. Because, let me tell you, that show was stupid as hell. Compare to something like Tale Spin, Rescue Rangers, Animaniacs, or Rocko's Modern Life, which are much more "family shows", and you can see a big difference there. It isn't merely that the shows are better, but that they aren't just targeted at kids. You can see the difference in animated feature films as well - the movies which are targeted at kids tend to be drivel, while the things targeted at families tend to be better. When you target children exclusively, that hurts, but if you target children inclusively, you can end up with something very good, because you aren't allowed to do certain things, putting constraints on your writing, and you still need to appeal. This means that character and emotion and other things really need to be pushed onto the audience.
If you look at the list of top-grossing rated G movies, and compare it to the top-grossing rated R movies, which list has better movies on it? The rated G movies. This despite the fact that studios actively avoid the dreaded G rating. And yet, the highest grossing rated-R movies list just isn't as good as the highest grossing rated-G movies. The top-grossing rated PG-13 movies list is topped by Avatar and Titanic, neither of which are amazing films, and filled out by The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Man's Chest, Iron Man 3, and Spider Man, none of which are great movies. Only The Dark Knight is something on that list I can say without doubt is a great movie, though the Hunger Games movies may be - I have not seen them. Admittedly once you get out of the top 10 you go into movies like Jurassic Park... but you also go into movies like Star Wars Episode 3, Transformers: Rise of the Fallen (the movie which I believe still holds the record for metacritic rating:gross ratio, and that's not a good thing), Spider-Man 2 and 3...
I dunno. It strikes me that the G-rated movie list is actually stronger than the other ratings, which really seems wrong if you assume that "kids stuff" is bad. TLK and Toy Story 3 are both amongst the best movies of all time, and Wall-E, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin are likewise revered - and Wall-E was probably a little light on appealing to the kids. They're family movies, not kid movies, and I think family stuff's constraints are what allow it to be strong - you have to focus on what you can do, and do it well.
Also, as far as brony demographics go:
I can tell you from my experience with actual internet surveys that they are nigh worthless unless you do them on your website. Doing them on Google or any other similar website is not going to get you representative results. The problem is that you end up with a biased response rate; while it is certainly true that many people will answer random survey questions, the problem is that when you ask a survey question which specifically interests some group, you will end up with a response which is disproportionately in their favor. While random sampling methodology helps in this regard - if you don't randomize your sample, you may as well not even bother - if someone sees "Are you a brony?" asked officially by Google, your odds of clicking on that question and answering it in the affirmative is clearly higher than seeing that question if you don't know about or care about the show. Most people skip most survey results - over 80% - and because you can see the question before you answer it, it is rather different from phone surveys, where people are likely to not respond to them, but aren't likely to not respond to them specifically because of what the survey is about. Because your pool is somewhat self-selecting, you end up with biased answers; the only way you could get unbiased answers in this way is if people had to choose to answer the question before being shown it.
This is not to say that there aren't a lot of bronies; my guesstimate from some numbers I've seen around the internet, via YouTube view counts and various traffic numbers, that there are probably as many bronies as there are children who watch the show. That's a bloody high number, but we're talking considerably less than ten million here.
But the thing is, why would you target them? You're already targeting them with the show. Changing who you're targeting is just a stupid idea.
On the other hand, Hasbro is completely insane for not producing MLP plushies. I'm sorry, but little kids get stuffed animals all the time, and adults have this thing about plushies. You aren't even not targeting little girls - you're just targeting everyone in general.
Tl; dr; Hasbro would be fools to change the show to better appeal to bronies, possibly already have to some extent which might explain some of the horrible season 4 episodes that don't really feel like they "fit". If they were to do anything, they should make video games and plushies which would plausibly appeal to both little girls AND to bronies.
Twilight 'suddenly having a brother' is not bad writing in a TV show in its second season.
Six or seven seasons in, when you have seen the character's family before, and absolutely noone could possibly not be there, fine. But in the second season, where the character in question doesn't live at home? It can have not come up.
See, there's this concept goddamn everyone seems to forget is basically god in TV shows- you have to carefully ration screen time. If you decide to show Shining at, say, the Hearth's Warming carol, you have to choose- are we taking time we could be setting up the premise, are we taking time from the play, or are we taking time from the final note we end on? the show could not be nearly as tight as it is without, on rare occasion, something coming up out of nowhere. Applejack never mention Applebuck season coming up, and she certainly never mentioned the rest of the family leaving town, so why is THAT simply accepted and Twilight's brother, who had no reason to appear before the season two finale, is not? Perhaps, rather than treat it as 'OMG they never told us gripe-gripe-gripe', we should treat it as 'telling us would have negatively effected prior episodes, so they chose to leave it until they needed him, assuming that the standard television audience already knows that things don't tend to come up if they aren't 'important''
1702108 Not to mention that the fact that we'd never heard of Shining Armor before was actually used by the episode as a key bit of character development. Twilight hadn't mentioned him before because she'd been drifting away from him over the years, and a major theme of the episode was her fear of losing him completely now that she'd been hit in the face with this fact. It led her friends and even Celestia herself to misinterpret Twilight's attitude toward Cadence, and Twilight's reaction ("she's evil!") probably wasn't nearly as sane-sounding as it would have been if she'd been more dispassionate about it.
Furthermore, the fact that Twilight once had close relationships with Cadence and Shining but had become a friendless study-hermit later in life showed that she'd actually been regressing by the time Celestia sent her to Ponyville. That's an interesting bit of character development, and sadly all too plausible.
So yeah. I think they did an excellent job of weaving this new character into an existing setting.
1701607 Great idea.
1701672 Also a good idea, though now I think removing the boycott element entirely might be better, because I don't trust bronies to do it.
1701880 A good point--they are already targeting us in some ways.
1702050 Also really good points. It hadn't occurred to me that A) Hasbro's idea of what bronies want might be just as accurate as their idea of what girls want, and B) Bronies want the stuff that's in the featured box.
>Faust wanted it to be much more adventure oriented
Yikes. So much for the legend.
1702296
Everyone sees executive meddling as some evil thing because it is typically presented from the point of view of the artist whose vision is being contaminated by whatever soulless corporation they're working for, when in reality corporate meddling actually tends to be a net positive for things because it ensures that things get done in a timely manner, actually have some sort of target audience, ect. Look at Duke Nukem Forever - an absolute piece of tripe that got sat on for a dozen years by its owners, and then finally released when they finally managed to drive themselves into bankruptcy via mismanagement and spending too long making the same game. Valve's lack of any sort of external motivators to publish has prevented Half Life 3 from getting done for the better part of a decade, and I suspect at this point they've kind of realized that Half Life 3 is going to be a disappointment no matter what they do, which is why it hasn't ever come out - they have to do something really amazing with it.
Freakazoid is another interesting example, where after they realized they were shooting for a different demographic, they retooled the show for prime time, and then got cancelled after the second season, which wasn't as strong as the first one was.
That is not to say that it is never bad - it can be bad - but that people who are being meddled with are likely to complain, and are likelier to be heard than the corporate drones who actually do, typically speaking, know what they're doing. That's not to say they don't make mistakes - and lord knows Hasbro has screwed things up for themselves before - but that just because a someone complains about corporate meddling, doesn't mean they're right in doing so.
1702374 I have to counter you re. Valve, because I was at Valve HQ in 1999 or 2000 to talk about AI for Half-Life 2. I thought they wanted sophisticated AI that would make it possible to tell better stories, but they said they were making so much money for so little work on Team Fortress (compared to Half-Life) that they now realized story wasn't nearly as profitable. It was corporate bean-counting that killed story there.
1701614 You can always trust the fool to make the foolish decision.
1702296 I had hoped season 4 would have been more adventure-orientated. It would have fully redeemed Twilicorn in my eyes.
In the meantime, if Hasbro ends up turning to the dark(er) side of corporate ham-fistedness, My brain is already bubbling with original creation neotenous species of exceptional ability for writing sci-fi fantasy. After that, it's just building a world around them, filling it with interesting characters, and bam, I have my creative vent of creating heart-felt stories of emotional significance. That way, I'm all set to prevent my heart from shriveling into a cold rock and my soul into noxious sour gas as I go into law.
1702399
I would love to say "they've realized that Half Life 3 is not nearly as profitable as spending their time doing other projects would be, so they made a decision not to make it, but don't really say that because people would go bananas" but, frankly, I don't think that's true at all - there are indications that they've been working on HL3 on some level for years, and their corporate non-structure doesn't really make for central decision making of that nature. I mean, they made Alien Swarm and released that for free, and they licensed out Counterstrike to Hidden Path to make CS:GO.
Though honestly at this point, anything Valve does isn't going to be as profitable to them as getting more people on Steam.
TV shows, like pets, have lives that are sadly far shorter than our own. And like pets, they tend to enter a wretched carpet - messing stage towards the end.
All we can do is care for them while we have them with us. And keep them on the linoleum.
1702411
I'm just gonna copy/paste this from a thread elsewhere that asked what Valve's biggest mistake is:
As far as making money goes, they're set there for the forseeable future with Steam. But, if for nothing else than the way they're set up, Valve isn't solely focused on making money. Look at DotA2. Sure, they've made oodles of cash, but the reason they made it boils down to some of their employees enjoying the original DotA. They were passionate about the game, convinced IceFrog agreed to work with them, and then made a game that many, many people enjoy. And they always talk about 'serving the customers' instead of how much money they make.
Really, if Valve didn't suck at communication so much... but they kinda do. BTW, the bottom of this article on RPS (it's in italics) mentions that 'soon' they're going to publish an article where they ask Valve about why they suck at communication. Fingers crossed for, well, anything.
There's a show that isn't catering to affluent, white college-aged males? Let's boycott it!
I'm only slightly trolling here. The fact is that most media targets the brony demographic (white, affluent, young adult males) because, as you state, they have a good deal of disposable income. Why should we do something with the intended effect of getting yet another show to cater to that audience? In fact, I think many bronies find MLP refreshing because it is one of the few high quality shows not catering to the typical college-aged male demographic. I somewhat agree that I would like the quality of the show to improve, but the boycott idea is probably the wrong way to go about achieving this goal.
1702751
I can already actually answer the communication question.
The answer is that they don't, some people just have an insane sense of entitlement. The reality is that when something is under development, there's only so much you want to say because things can change considerably, possibly radically.
That being said, I do agree that Half-Life is possibly a distraction for them, though on the other hand, I actually disagree that they're a terribly creative bunch - Portal was created by them hiring people from outside and them doing something very different. Indeed, Valve makes fairly few games, and most of them aren't really anything super distinctive. Portal is really the exception - everything else stands out in execution more than anything else, and even then, honestly, I've always been baffled by why people thought the HL games were something special.
Seeing all the criticism of Season 4 is interesting, to me. I started watching ponies during the second half of Season 1 (3-digit FimFictioin UID, yo), and I've been enjoying myself during S4.
I watch it with my wife, SPark, every Saturday. We... see the weaknesses, but the discussion usually then turns to speculating about what restrictions or decisions or thought processes might have led to those results, and what we might have done differently.
We are not necessarily kind when picking at stories. Elsewhere on the internet, we have ripped Into Darkness and Desolation of Smaug to bloody tatters for being bloated piles of bad storytelling motivated by Shiny. But the shortcomings in Pony just... don't seem to freak us out the way they do some people.
People have been predicting the Coming Pandering Apocalypse since Lesson Zero (CrazyTwi was a total corruption of the character and evidence that they were now writing episodes for bronies, for those who don't recall). It seems like every episode gets panned on release. Then, after a while, it joins the canon of Examples Of How This Show Used To Be Good as an equal to all the rest.
Boycotts are the Big Stick. They are difficult to organize, but quite powerful. I feel like if you're going to organize a boycott, you need to have a very clear issue you're campaigning for. "Stop writing stupid episodes" isn't good enough; "Stop interfering with the writers" is better, and having one particular writer to rally around would be best. And make sure as big a majority of the fandom as you can manage is on board with that message before you put your foot in your mouth.
I also think that if you want to send a message, something better than a boycott would be to have everyone buy one particular product and boycott everything else for a month. That would demonstrate a level of organization and passion far beyond what a boycott can manage.
1703389 Yeah, you're right--I've got no concrete agenda. A boycott is a little hostile and probably inappropriate.
I think having a "Bronies buy pony" month, though, just to remind them we're here, would be a good idea.
Considering how this discussion has bled into gaming:
"Who touched Norma Jean?
Who touched mah gun?"
th07.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2012/266/f/5/the_soft_spoken_tank_of_the_coldfront_by_tarantad0-d5fp6mn.jpg
(The artist is Tarantad0 whom you may visit here).
Maybe not related to anything, but: How many episodes are we expecting for Season 4? I haven't been following this at all (I was slightly surprised when I overheard second-or-fourth-hand from around fimfic that S3 was going to be 13 episodes); I was assuming S4 would be another 13-episode one, but there seem to be implications that it's 26?
1701708
I don't have your numbers for Seasons 1&2, but by my count(3), that makes Season 3 a bad season, by comparison. Consider this: if Season 1 and Season 3 have the same number of 'bad' episodes, that means twice as much of Season 3 is 'bad' as Season 1.
Just because the season's shorter.
That doesn't make Season 3 bad overall(1), nor does it have much to do with apathetic bronies(2), but an experiential note for you.
Add me to your body of anecdotal evidence, though.
(1) At least half of it is at least pretty good, and I haven't seen most of the rest
(2) That'd be 'Hasbro stupidity' and/or 'fandom fatigue'
(3) Not actually 'count', because I'm going by your 'numbers'
1701792
Well, as I hear it, TOS was some of the less-good Trek, though; with TNG and I think Voyager considered 'better'.
Better by what criteria, however, I don't know. I'd call this around third-hand at best.
1702209
Hoary frack also new headcanon. That makes so much sense.
1703389 1703571
If I read him right, he's not suggesting "Bronies buy pony" month. He's suggesting "Bronies buy a Hasbro-made pony plushie" month, or something similar. A very specific product, not just pony.
And then, as someone else said: isn't one of the more attractive things about pony that it's not aimed squarely at college-aged white males?
1704614
I think you may have mistaken me. When I say "on par with", I mean "adjusting for total episode count per season, about what I'd expect to see". I think Season 1 had something like four or five episodes I thought were great and two or three I really didn't much like. Season 2 had maybe one more episode I thought was great than Season 1 did, and 0-1 I could live without I think. So Season 1 and Season 3 were about on par, adjusting for total number of episodes, and Season 2 was a little bit better.
Looks like we're getting a Season 5 already, though, so yay to that!
I couldn't agree more. Inn the recent discussion post on EqD I suggested hiring her back because of this very reason. I'm expecting my post to either be banned or burned with fire of the thousand suns, but that's unimportant...
However, while your idea is pretty interesting, you'd have a really hard time to make it work.
Besides, do you really think you want to turn MLP into a show for bronies? I'm already sick and tired of DXH kissing our asses now and then with ridiculous, needless, story-breaking shout-outs (that spoiler from the upcoming episode... 
).
I guess i really miss Lauren's S1 times, when she made ponies appeal to everyone.
1701736
A short list of songs that were released recently that I thought were similar to the ones in your post:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n94ccfXcf5w
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKK_rIcxzRo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkhpWkVlxbU
Popular songs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVCpr1Tp3eY
PitchForkish songs: http://fimmusic.tumblr.com/
1701880 >>baby abomination things
This phrase needs to be used more often.
1704649
Darn it, I knew this kind of miscommunication would come up!
So when I read "on par with", I understood it as "about the same number of 'bad' episodes"; whereas when you said "on par with", you meant "about the same percentages of good and bad episodes"---or for anyone reading who's not a math geek, "about the same number of good episodes per bad episode".
Which is an idea I'd like to explore more...
I didn't have any numbers before, but now I have some vague ones. You said that Season 1 had "two or three [episodes] I really didn't much like". Earlier (back about 1701708), you said "Season 3 had ... only two or three I really dislike." Not having exact numbers, those look about the same to me, maybe worse for season 3.
Incidentally, I don't know why I'm trying so hard to convince you that Season 3 was bad. I don't want season 3 to be bad. I want the show to be good. Besides which, it's rude to ruin something you're enjoying without a good, real reason.
I think you understood my point earlier, but I'll restate it here anyways:
If Season 1 and Season 3 have the same number of bad episodes, that makes Season 3 worse, because there isn't as much of Season 3 to begin with.
>>Looks like we're getting a Season 5 already, though, so yay to that!
That doesn't tell me what I wanted, though, so: do you know if 4x14 is going to 'actually' be 5x1, or if we're going to get a 4x14, 4x15, 4x20...
If not, that's absolutely fine, I'm just curious.
1704614
How did you make a quote bubble sticking out the right side of a quote bubble?
1706182 That's an aside box (remember those?
) above a quote box. In retrospect, I should have put the aside box below the >>reply thingy, but above the quote box, because this squishes the expanded >>reply quite ridiculously.
So when I type that up, it goes <aside box> <quote box>, and it displays as you saw. (And I'm kicking myself for going <aside box> >>reply <quote box> instead of >>reply <aside box> <quote box>.)
It's not like that blog post is hard to find. It's one of the first things I put on site, fer Pete's sake.
I have never cared about the toys, mostly just shrugging at their existence, cursing when they dictate the story and recognizing that the show wouldn't exist without them.
1701708
Yeah, I'm a bit annoyed, but as long as people aren't being fucking smug about not watching the show anymore, I'll let it slide. Those people know who they are.
Also, Billycolt told me that Lauren wanted ponies to be a completely non-alcoholic society, which feels more unbelievable than the existence of magic to me.
1701740
So what did Craig McCracken do, then? Not that I'm denying Faust had her hand in those shows, but she's not the original creator.
1702209
That's all kind of a good point, but I still kind of feel like everyone's behavior in that two-parter was a bit blunt. I thought Twilight's behavior in trying to find out Cadance's secret and such was a bit too shrill and reckless, while her friends shaming her at the end of part one was a complete WTF. Nopony has any empathy for her at all? They just rub salt in the wound?
1702374
Southland Tales proved that uncompromised artistic vision is not always a good thing. Watch this movie only if you enjoy watching creative trainwrecks (as I do).
1702895
The only answer that I can really give is a cynical one that undercuts what I genuinely think is a good game series: there are a lot of people who would much rather kick ass as a nerd like Gordon Freeman instead of meatheads like Marcus Fenix.
That's the only reason that I'm sure is true, though others have posited that the games have appeal because of little backgroud details, a lack of obtrusive out-of-perspective cutscenes, the right amount of ambiguity in setting details, segments of the game that somehow sear into my memory and remain that way long after I finished playing the games, and so on. All I really know is that I much prefer being able to carry all the weapons at once and finding health kits to the two-weapon system with regenerating health.
As for Team Fortress 2, it has great character designs, personality, and a sense of humor. It is the only multiplayer FPS that I think I've ever really cared about, though I'm still not hugely in love with it. Maybe some of the things they've added after the initial release undercut what made the game good and maybe they didn't. I didn't play enough to make sure, and I don't have a real opinion on the Left 4 Dead games either.
1704614
Really? Because the way I heard it, fans loathe Voyager. And Enterprise. And the first couple seasons of TNG. But I've only seen TOS at the moment, so I wouldn't know. (In case you're wondering, it's not really my kind of show since it has no serialization but I thought it was usually alright on its own merits.)
1713598 Very well I stand corrected, thanks.