A Little Bit About Big Mac

Just to start off, this isn't a chaff in my head cannon post because I'm not laying out any canon - merely stating personal observations.

The big, red, guy is a shipping magnet. He's practically an international freight station at this point. I've seen him well written as a partner for Rainbow Dash, Twilight Sparkle, Rarity, Fluttershy, and Cheerilee. I'm positive there're tons of other folks he's been well written with that I haven't read. What I wanted to get out in this blog post is WHY I think that keeps happening.

Largely, it's because he's such a blank slate.

All a decent writer has to do is take the few givens we have about him - hard working, strong, silent type, stubborn - and mold those to fit the usually much more well defined character he's being set up with.

Most of that adjustment comes in giving some plausible reason as to why he's so succinct in his speech. Want to pair him up with Fluttershy? You're probably going to go the "birds of a feather" route and make him shy. Want him with Twilight? You've got the easy angle of having him being a backwoods philosopher or an intellectual introvert.

The point is, it's what the writer chooses to have him thinking that gives the link to the pony they're pairing him with. It's usually bad writing when they have him become suddenly talkative.

By not speaking, he's the perfect stallion for the author to give a voice to. A canon OC if you will.

And the reason people are so willing to accept him is because of the rest of that very basic bit of character building we've gotten from the show; namely that he's such a good person.

You have a lot of work to do if you want to make Mac into any kind of antagonist, and even more if you want him to be an actual villain. Without the work, it's just not believable and the story suffers massively because of it.

Being the good person he is, he's worthy of anybody he's paired with. All of the main characters deserve someone who will treat them right, and with Mac's core platform being the exact qualities to do that, he's easy to plug in.

Deserve. That really is the crux of it all. The show's writers have done a very good job of getting us to like these silly little ponies, so we want the best for them. We want them to be happy, and Mac is a well built cart to deliver that deserved happiness. And we want it for them because so often in our lives life, the universe, and everything just isn't very fair. People let their pettiness kill their love, bad guys sometimes win, and the good die before their time.

It's only natural to want to see stories where things end up the way we wish they would in the real world. It not only helps to heal the hurt from those bumps, breaks, and bruises, but it also encourages and inspires us to work towards making those happy endings reality. And sure, even with all our effort the guy doesn't always get the girl, but at least some do.