Gilda the Villainess · 11:34pm Nov 18th, 2014
I realize there are not a lot of actual antagonists in MLP, and certainly not very many that don't end up all fluffy and friendly by the end of the episode, but I get just a little bit tired of people casting Gilda as an actual villain.
The Flim Flam brothers really are con men. Suri Polomare is really a bitch. Trixie really did get possessed by an evil amulet because she wanted to one-up Twilight Sparkle for humiliating her, and while under its influence she was a genuine villain. But Gilda is a brash, crass friend of Rainbow's who doesn't have a problem with bullying those weaker than her and occasionally likes to shoplift for thrills. She's not a villain.
I recently re-watched Griffon the Brush-off, and the thing I noticed is that the narrative is transparently manipulative. In the beginning of the interaction with Gilda, Pinkie is wrong. She is wrong to be constantly intruding on her friend's time with a different friend who she hasn't seen in a while. She is being an intrusive, annoying jerk who wants constant attention from Rainbow Dash and is not okay with Rainbow having a friend who isn't also her friend. If a friend of mine did this to me when I had a chance to catch up with an old friend from long ago, I'd be furious.
Pegasi are ponies. They do, however, seem to be... what's the word, tougher than other ponies. I don't mean they really can take more punishment or can fight better, I mean that they're more prone to fronting, hiding their sappier emotions, and idolizing strength and speed over friendliness. This is certainly not universally true -- neither Fluttershy nor Derpy/Ditzy display these traits -- but they're both supposed to be very weird for pegasi. Pegasi appear to have more cultural differences from other ponies, on average, than unicorns and earth ponies have from each other (wealthy earth ponies like Filthy Rich behave quite a bit like upper class unicorns). And their culture most likely aligns them better with a species that's predatory and probably a lot more comfortable with violence than ponies are.
But pegasi are still ponies. They're still part of the culture of Ultra Harmony. They're very much used to other ponies being intrusively friendly. Griffins, most likely, are not. So Rainbow Dash (who starts the episode thinking Pinkie is annoying) has reasons to give Pinkie the benefit of the doubt when they find something in common (and among her reasons are the fact that Pinkie and she are both Bearers and are gonna have to work together). But Gilda really doesn't. Gilda's got a lot in common with Rainbow Dash, but without the shared experience of being Equestrian ponies in Equestrian pony culture, Gilda has nothing in common with Pinkie.
So Pinkie's being an ass. But then when she's advised to observe Gilda to see if maybe she is the one being an ass, the narrative insists that Gilda is bad by showing her shoplifting and bullying Fluttershy (bullying Fluttershy is particularly over the top.) So Gilda's a jerk. This does not mean Pinkie was right, earlier, but Pinkie takes it as such.
Gilda tries very, very hard to play along and be a good sport at the party Pinkie throws for her, but eventually the humiliation piles on humiliation and she is overwhelmed. A pony, being part of pony culture, not feeling as if they are by necessity outsiders and not being surrounded by strangers, might be able to manage good humor for a lot longer than this. But I suspect a pony surrounded by total strangers or a pony who spent their childhood being viciously bullied would not tolerate this behavior any longer than Gilda does. Rainbow Dash, being the introspective, socially savvy pony that she is, has no comprehension that Gilda would feel differently about this situation than Dash does, because Rainbow Dash isn't even beginning to try to comprehend what it feels like to be surrounded by members of a completely different culture and species, who are total strangers, who appear to be cruelly pranking you to humiliate you. So Gilda tolerates this until she snaps, and then Rainbow Dash doesn't stand with her, which is naturally going to appear to her as if Dash is perfectly okay with her being viciously humiliated in front of strangers because Dash's loyalty is to her fellow ponies and not her old friend.
I think there are actually very, very few humans who wouldn't react the same way.
Gilda's a jerk, obviously (no one who would bully Fluttershy isn't), and seems to think she's better than ponies. But Gilda's not in any way, shape or form a villain. The only difference between her story and Cranky Doodle's is that Cranky gets to have a happy ending. Gilda reacts the way anyone would in the situation she was in, and Rainbow Dash really hurts her feelings by not standing up for her. Probably Gilda's now pretty pissed off at ponies... but hell, wouldn't you be?
And the unfortunate thing about this episode is that Pinkie was actually in the wrong in the beginning, but because Gilda is a jerk, she (and the audience of children) take to heart the idea that Gilda wanting time with Rainbow Dash without having to share her with Dash's new friends that Gilda doesn't know was wrong and makes Gilda a meanie pants. Gilda may be a meanie pants, but not for that reason.
(All that being said, I don't believe there's any justification for calling for Rainbow's head, either. Rainbow is oblivious, unempathic, and when pushed to make a choice between one friend and several, chooses her several new friends who also happen to be her teammates as part of Equestria's mystical defense force, which one would expect from Loyalty. I don't get stories where Gilda is secretly the princess of the Griffons -- like, really? She has no diplomatic skills, she's uncouth, what about her behavior suggests she has any kind of noble rank whatsoever? And I don't get stories where Rainbow's portrayed as evil for not standing up for Gilda. Rainbow's behavior is just as expected and normal for her situation as Gilda's is.)
So stories which cast Gilda as a genuine villain annoy me. She's a jerk. Not a villain.
Which isn't going to prevent my villain protagonist from recruiting her, since he's more interested in recruiting jerks than villains, and that's going to lead to her being called a villain, but that's not the same thing as actually being one.
Yep I agree.
Well, wheneaver I used Gilda in a rp (or rather, my sister plays her character) or when I give ideas for other people to write (I am not a writer, again, unlike my sister), I always made her - and everyone else - just people. They have flaws and they have good attributes.
What I mean is: I agree wholeheartedly with you. She was a jerk, but not a villain. Pinkie was in the wrong in the beginning and Rainbow should just have tried to seek for a common ground solution instead of just siding against her old friend but, in th end, acted much like what someone in her situation and with her personality would.
Agree with everything you said, except I would say the Flim Flam brothers aren't just con men. They're brilliant inventors who ruin their own products by being shortsighted and greedy, but they only run cons (i.e. sell products that don't work) when they are between real inventions.
Oh, and of course Discord is going to recruit jerks instead of villains. Real villains, like Sombra, are far more powerful, dangerous and uncontrollable, and would be plotting to undermine Discord at the first chance. Jerks, however, aren't experienced enough to realize they are being used as cannon fodder, they are more likely to do as they are told.
On the other hand, Trixie was just a jerk until she put on that amulet...
Yeah, Pinkie can be kind of terrible sometimes. Laughter knows not of tact, and its Bearer isn't much better.
It makes sense that pegasi are more culturally distinct from the other tribes. Cloudsdale and any other cloud cities that might be out there imply a certain level of isolationism that's lingered since the days of Pegasopolis.
I look forward to seeing what you do with Gilda. I dread to see what Anon might do to her...
Flim Flam, Lightning Dust, Gilda, Suri and Trixie were just jerks. Not villains. Diamond dogs, hydra, dragons, cockatrice and timber wolves were also just antagonists but not villains. Villain is someone who is a big deal and mean to do evil and destruction. The one i mentioned are either a part of the nature or part of the society.
Yeah. I'm a major Trixie fan, as should be obvious from my output, and I see her as a flawed heroine or anti-heroine more than a villain, but with the Alicorn Amulet, Trixie was a villain. She didn't actually try to kill anypony, but she essentially-enslaved a whole town, tortured Snips and Snails, and did several things which could have gotten Ponies killed -- she just didn't care.
My take on this was that the Alicorn Amulet was very, very evil, and that the only reason Trixie didn't do truly horrible things like rape, maim and kill other Ponies was that her personality is fundamentally-good, and she was resisting the worst impulses from the Amulet. But if she hadn't been stopped, she would have wound up committing really evil deeds.
Trixie evidently agrees with this analysis, because she later thanked Twilight for freeing her from the Amulet, and outright apologized for her actions when under its control. And Trixie's overweening pride normally makes it hard for her to express gratitude.
Agreed. She's more of a violent jerk. And not really all that violent, either -- the only Pony she physically attacks in any way is Pinkie, who is after all refusing to let her be alone with Rainbow Dash, somepony she loves and hasn't seen in a long time.
Though crippling Pinkie's aircraft in midair might well have killed anypony but Pinkie. It's safe to say, at least, that Gilda has anger issues.
Very much yes. Whether or not Gilda is also romantically-attracted to Dashie, and whether or not Rainbow Dash is attracted to Gilda, Pinkie's behavior is wrong. Even if Dashie and Gilda are purely just friends, they still want to spend time with one another. Pinkie shouldn't have intruded.
In fact, Pinkie's behavior in this episode is one of the reasons I see Pinkie as highly neotenous and far less emotionally-mature for her age than any other member of the Mane Six. She's 19 years old by my count, but she's acting like she's around 9.
And in "Hearth's Warming Eve" it's shown that in the past they had an even more militaristic culture. In many ways Rainbow Dash is an ideal Pegasus -- she has both the strength and weaknesses of Pegasus culture to an inordinate extent, including her difficulty with seeing herself from the outside, and her inability to express her softer emotions openly.
... and we know from other episodes that other Griffons are able to control their own behavior and display aplomb under pressure. Gilda's young, hot-headed, immature and impulsive. But then, so's Rainbow Dash.
Which, really, makes the story a tragedy (though not a very dark one, as nobody gets killed). A friendship which obviously meant a lot to both Rainbow and Gilda gets ruined, because of their heroic flaws. Gilda, in particular, seems heartbroken at the end, just barely holding it in because she's not about to display weakness in front of her enemies.
I really do see Gilda as rather a nasty jerk, but even nasty jerks have feelings. And the worst things she does in the whole episode, she does in direct response to Pinkie's harassment of her.
My reading of the episode is that this is the dark side of Reality Warping powers under the control of somepony who is emotionally a child. It's only because she was brought up well by her family that she isn't wishing everypony who annoys her into the cornfield.
Well, I do agree with a few things here. Gilda's not a villainess. In fact, I considered making her an antagonist, hesitated, and then tossed her for Lightning Dust, who I consider to be far worse, and makes a better foil for Rainbow Dash. She doesn't care about doing stuff that could get ponies killed. Gilda at her worst doesn't do that.
--well, actually, maybe she does. Her "buzz off" could have wound up with a very violent and painful finish, and it doesn't, because this is a cartoon and because Pinkie is Pinkie. And the "hah, hah, everything's cool, Dashie . . . now you listen to me, you little punk, buzz off or I'll punch your lights out . . . "
Gilda is scary. But she's still not Lightning Dust.
I don't think the narrative suggests that Pinkie was right in the first place. She's annoying in the way that a child understands being annoying, because I'm sure many have friends, playmates, or younger siblings who do the same thing. And when Twilight calls her on it, she acknowledges that maybe it's true, and I think the audience at this point is supposed to think, "Yep, you were annoying. You really should let your friend play with her old friend."
I think what she does next is her attempt to re-think the evidence of her own eyes, based on Twilight's scolding, that Gilda is, in fact, a violent bully. The stuff she pulls--pranking a little old lady (which on the evidence of the same episode, Pinkie would not do), shoplifting--shoplifting, geez, that is an awful thing to do, in my book, and I don't understand why this gets blown off by some people as "just a prank"--and screaming at someone vulnerable just because she's vulnerable--is bad, and Pinkie's judgement that bad behavior is bad is 100% correct. And she STILL throws her a party, and it goes wrong because Dash doesn't know when enough is too much, and because Gilda is grabby and grabs presents and cakes and pushes herself to the front of every line (therefore insuring that she's the one who gets every prank.)
Nope. I'm from New Jersey. I went to school with Gildas. They were violent punks who shoved you into lockers. They also would have made crappy villains because they usually were in bad relationships and/or dropped out of school by the time they were sixteen for drug-related reasons, pregnancy, or both. They (and she) had very poor impulse control, which an actual villain has to have.
Nah. I don't think so. I saw it as "Pinkie was wrong and acknowledged it, and tried to make things right. Her attempt to make things right did not work because Gilda was a meanie pants, but she still was wrong and it was right to try to make things right."
Now, the canon writer who gets Gilda dead wrong is G.M. Berrow in Twilight Sparkle and the Crystal Heart Spell. She has Gilda teaming up with Trixie (? Since when does the G&P T work with anyone?) and somehow, for some reason, she's acquired the eloquence to convince Twilight Sparkle to act like a jerk because TS had stupid flakes for breakfast, I guess.
I don't understand a lot of things people do. I don't understand Princess Gilda the Misunderstood Griffon, and I really don't understand Woobie Lightning Dust. The characters in this episode act like children, because it's a children's show. It's a playground problem with playground strategy:
1. Your new friend has old friends. You should back off and let them spend time together. (Specifically articulated in the moral.)
2. You should try to get over your jealousy and be nice to the old friends.
3. There's a difference between feeling bad because your friend is too busy to play with you, and seeing that someone is actually doing bad things.
I think people just do not want to acknowledge that in Season One, supposedly the uber-perfect season when all was at its purest and Faustiest, the show was really kind of rudimentary with kid's problems, and the characters were still mostly acting like kids. None of the characters in that episode, anyway, act like grownups. I suppose I could feel bad or worry about what Gilda's life is like after her mom is called and she's taken home from the birthday party because she won't play nice with the other children, but I'm too busy feeling glad that she's not shoving me or my friends into lockers. Ultimately, I don't like Gilda, but I also just don't find her very interesting.
2603388 Hmm. I can't help but think that the reason the Alicorn Amulet had the effect it did on Trixie is because she gave it plenty of material to work with. And she still wants to zap Rainbow Dash into agony after she's lost the capacity to do so.
Totally agree with both of you about Pegasus culture, BTW, and while I haven't had too much time to go into it, Cloudsdale Prep reflects that kind of "with your shield or on it" culture. I'm still working on Command Performance, and I'm not going into the different cultures of Equestria TOO much, but writing about different ways of celebrating different holidays is a great way to touch on it. According to Dash, the way most Pegasi celebrate Hearth's Warming Tide involves the Pony equivalent of drinking a lot of beer, watching football, and yelling at the television.
(I was probably influenced by this.):
th09.deviantart.net/fs71/PRE/i/2011/272/9/9/bubbles_31_by_petirep-d4badme.jpg
Source.
In my head, this is still the way Dash's Dad looks.
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True enough. But Flim and Flam really are con men who lie to ponies for financial gain. Suri really did commit plagiarism. Trixie wasn't really a bad pony at all but under the influence of the Alicorn Amulet she became monstrous (kind of a Nightmare Trixie), which makes her a legit minor villain the way Luna is a legit major villain. But the only unprovoked crime Gilda commits is shoplifting an apple. (She does break Pinkie's gyrocopter, but then, Pinkie is harassing her with it.)
The role of "antagonist" could be anyone who is in the way of the main characters. Technically speaking Cheese Sandwich was an antagonist, because his actions made Pinkie miserable and she confronted and challenged him. This wasn't really Cheese's fault -- he was actually trying to impress Pinkie, not supplant her, and he's such a sympathetic character that no one thinks of him as an antagonist, but technically speaking that was his role in the story. So I'm willing to concede that Flim and Flam, and Suri, and to a certain extent Diamond Tiara, function as minor villains. (Diamond doesn't do anything illegal either so far as I can recall, but her constant bullying makes her a consistent recurring antagonist, which qualifies as a minor villain.) But Gilda is purely just an antagonist.
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Oh, I dunno, I frequently want to zap Rainbow Dash into agony, and I don't have to put up with her in real life. :-)
I agree with this (and everything else you've said), but I also think that Rainbow still needs to make amends here. It's been at least a year since Gilda last showed up. In that time, I think that Rainbow has had more character development than any of the mane characters besides Twilight. So if "Griffon the Brushoff" had been a season 5 episode instead of a season 1 episode, I think that Rainbow would have stood up for Gilda and tried to stay loyal to her and the rest of the mane six. So I also think that one of these days, Rainbow needs to realize that everyone was a bit in the wrong in that episode and do something about it. I think she's grown enough to suck up her pride a bit and try to reconcile things with one of her oldest friends.
2603307 Agree. It always surprises me that unicorns are written as racist more often than any other tribe, when the major Pegasi cities are built so only Pegasi can live there (or maybe you're a super powerful unicorn casting cloud walking spells several times a day, but realistically only Pegasi.)
2603582
I saw that as the mind-bending effects of the Amulet taking a few moments to recover from, more than anything else. It's easier to recover from than the One Ring, but it's still not instant.
2603582
It's at best a "did not think this through "impulsive action on Gilda's part. A Griffon or Pegasus knocked out of the sky could crash-land on her flight field. A Unicorn mage powerful enough to fly would also be powerful enough to raise a shield before impact. But Pinkie's an Earth Pony. Normally, there wouldn't even be Earth Ponies up there in any numbers -- artificial flight's new in their culture.
Gilda probably didn't even realize that she might kill somepony this way -- and she didn't much care. That's poor impulse control, and if Griffons as a whole had this poor impulse control, they wouldn't be able to function very well living in any large numbers or with any other races. It seems plausible that the Griffons are in general more aggressive than the Ponies -- but probably not as aggressive as Gilda. She has problems.
Should she care? Well, yeah. If she actually kills somepony -- anypony, but killing one of the Element Bearers would be an especially bad idea -- she would presumably get into very serious legal trouble. I find it difficult to believe that even the rather laid-back and libertarian Equestrian culture would be okay with murder. Indeed, because they're generally rather nonviolent, the Ponies might take murder more seriously than do we.
What's more, remember what she was fighting over? Rainbow Dash's friendship. Even if we assume that Gilda has no fear of Pony law (why?) it seems rather unlikely that Rainbow Dash would be cool with Gilda killing one of Dashie's other friends.
Well, on the list of crimes it's fairly low -- it's just a misdemeanor regarding most items in our society. But you're right, this bothered me because she did this quite intentionally and with no provocation. It implies that she doesn't have very good morals. And again, it's poor impulse control on her part.
Right. Someone like Gilda is far more likely to just drift through life getting in increasingly-serious trouble until she's worn down by the consequences of her cumulative mistakes, or (worse) wind up the pawn of a true villain. Actually, if Griffon society is more violent than Pony society (it is for my Griffons), she's very likely to wind up either killed in a duel, or outlawed. If she really is athletically competent (and, note: she can keep up with Rainbow Dash, so she probably is rather competent), she might wind up some sort of brigand, criminal or mercenary -- and might have some interesting adventures before an inevitable violent death.
I can see Trixie teaming up with someone, but what I can't see is Trixie teaming up with Gilda. They are both notably obnoxious characters who lack common sense in social matters and have no ability to admit when they're wrong or apologize for their errors. Trixie and Gilda would be an explosion waiting to happen.
Why do I think that Trixie & Rainbow Dash works as a team-up when Trixie & Gilda doesn't? Because Rainbow Dash is good-natured under the bombast. Besides, Trixie needed Rainbow Dash to get out of trouble, and that gave her an incentive to tone her own arrogance down. (And, while they stopped being enemies, I still don't think that Trixie and Rainbow Dash could stand each other for long).
Oh, I am sure it worked on Trixie by playing on her arrogance and bad temper. And she didn't instantly recover from its effects. But, then, the artifact the writers based it on -- the One Ring of Power -- also worked on whatever flaws one already had, and one never fully recovered from its effects (which is why Frodo had to leave for the Uttermost West at the end of the trilogy).
Understand -- while I like Trixie more than you do, I am quite aware that she's a bitch. She has her virtues, perhaps paramount of which is courage, but she also has a lot of flaws -- arrogance, bad temper, and even a degree of sadism. When I depict her through her own eyes, or Piercing's, I am showing her in the most favorable light possible, since both Trixie and Piercing are in love with Trixie.
There's a reason she's a wanderer, and it's that she offends so many other Ponies so fast that she often finds it wise to leave town in a hurry!
Griffon the Brushoff is one of the episodes created in the 1st half of Seaon # o1 not wriiten by Lauren Faust. Many of these such as Bridle Gossip have the characters out of character. By th 2nd half of Season # 01, the writers wrote the characters like Lauren Faust does. The way Pinkie acts is undersytandable:
Pinkie wants attention. She wants to play with Dash and Gilda.
Gilda is a vicious bully who could have killed Pinkie by busting her balloons and breaking her flying machine. She steals. She terrorizes FlutterShy without provocation. Both Dash and Gilda love racing and stunts; so, it makes sense that they are friends, but Dash is better without her.
Dash is way out of character:
As the Element of Loyalty, she should have tried to reconcile Pinkie and Gilda. When Gilda storms off, Dash should have tried to salvage the relationship —— Dash is better off without Gilda.
Dash is out of character, but this is forgivable because this is an episode from the 1st half of Season # 01 not written by Lauren Faust.
What's all this about killing? Are you forgetting that ponies are made of marshmallow and can survive getting a piano dropped on their head without consequences?
Here, a mental image for you: any of the main six being backseat riders on the Pinkiecopter, and them getting out of the wreckage in character-specific ways (Rarity being near hysterical at having her coat ruined, etc).
I always get annoyed when people write war fics and cast the griffons as the enemy. Think about it: how many griffons have we seen in the show?
1. Gilda
2. Gustave LeGrande
and the three from the Equestria Games. That's five. Five characters, and only one of them was an actual antagonist. Hell, if anything, they seem to have free rights to travel in Equestria, and participate in their national games. I always thought they would be Equestria's staunchest ally. Antagonistic to a point, but loyal. Kind of like the Klingons in the last few seasons of Deep Space Nine.
So I take it that you feel the same way about making Prince Blueblood a villain? All things considered I'm surprised that you didn't mention him.
2607516 I feel even more strongly about Blueblood, but he is his own topic.