Interesting Times: A Fable of a Lost Episode · 8:54pm Apr 18th, 2017
Season 7 has now begun. The most remarkable thing about the opening was how underwhelming it was. Nothing actually bad about it, but we are accustomed to the opening episodes involving epic battles between ponykind and the forces of evil, in which a thousand-year old monster, or something, emerges to threaten the fate of Equestria or the Crystal Empire, and Twilight Sparkle and friends get together to blast it with rainbows and lasers.
This time we had a rather bland couple of friendship lessons about pupil-teacher relations. What is going on here? Has the magic of friendship finally rendered Equestria such a happy and peaceful place that there are no villains left to fight, and ponies have no choice but to live happily ever after, with nothing more important to worry about than what present to get their friend on her graduation?
Is this a sign that the show has been going on for too long, the scriptwriters are getting tired, and it will now follow the inevitable slow decline until it is finally cancelled to make way for a next generation? Or could it be something more interesting? Could it be that these episodes were not originally intended as the opener? It almost felt we had missed something and jumped straight into numbers 3 and 4. Could it be that a much more epic two-part opener had been written, but was then cancelled for some reason?
Given the timescales on which the industry operates, production of season 7 would have been well underway by the November 2016 presidential election. The scripts would have been finished. Then that event turned America upside-down and shook up society more than anyone anticipated. Back in early 2016, nobody in authority thought Donald Trump had a chance of winning. He was consistently down in the polls, all the serious political analysts were saying that while he might get the Republican nomination, he was just too unpopular with too many Americans to be elected president.
Now that the Donald is the president, society has to adjust to this new reality. And that society is more divided than ever.
Could there have been something about the planned opener, which would have seemed fine six months ago, but in the new era, was sufficiently risky that the producer decided to drop it? Was the planned story a battle against an autocratic tyrant? Perhaps a story about welcoming Changelings into Equestria, which could have been greeted with delight by liberal America and used in their fight to defend the rights of immigrants, and thus upset Trump supporters?
And consider that six months ago, it was 70-80% certain that Hillary Clinton would be elected the first female US president. That event would very likely have been exploited by the marketing department as the inevitable Girl Power surge would push parents to buy toys depicting female leaders for their daughters. There has been a growing movement pushing for more of this for some years. It did seem to be the way the industry was going, but it is not so certain now. Marketers do plan strategies a long time ahead, keep the details secrets, and then may change things at the last minute if trends are going the other way to what they anticipated.
Hasbro’s business model relies on selling huge numbers of cheap plastic toys to a very wide market. It makes sense that they would choose to play it safe. A hint of anti-authoritarianism would win them lots of praise, but probably not lead to greater sales. But if they upset the president’s fans, it could really hurt them. A sustained attack on My Little Pony by the alt-right is not inconceivable (look at what happened to the Ghostbusters film), and it could lead many conservative parents to decide to buy their kids Barbies instead.
Of course it is rather more likely there is a simpler explanation. Perhaps the script writers had just got bored of epic fights, and wanted to write something simple this time. But this alternative possibility gives us an exciting creative writing challenge. Write a story for the hypothetical cancelled season opener. Something sufficiently controversial in the Trump era that Hasbro would have had to block it, but which would have been okay before November 8. And who knows, maybe in years to come, the real ‘lost episode’ will emerge.
So, you're giving the people on this site an actual excuse to write thinly-veiled anti-Trump pony stories.
The cast and crew, at least, are not at all reluctant to express their distaste for the alien wig-puppet.
All in all, I doubt it very much. For one thing, any big adventure would get in the way of the episode celebrating the conclusion of the previous big adventure. I think the likeliest explanation is that the show is deliberately avoiding the escalation of spectacle because they intend to continue for a long time still to come. In a lot of ways, these episodes tasted of the first two seasons to me: new friendships with the problems of new friendships that the old cast can't realistically still be dealing with.
Its been too soon after Chrysalis was beaten and the new power ups were demonstrated? After all, with discord on their side, he has to take a real hands off approach to things.
After all, discord can clone himself as many times as required, in as many forms as required, without needing the mirror pool etc to solve any problem. In fact, thats maybe the reason why he doesnt solve things, its antichaos, its boring, its cheap and easy.
Wonder what happened to him in teh past that taught him that, or more likely, given his non linear temporal existance, thats what lessened his actions in the past, because he is finding out about what they mean now?
Oh look, a scan the past spell set. Now, I know a truely generalised aim point would almost certainly end up in deep space, because space is big, really big, etc. thereby giving the vaccuum effect but given the relative difficulty in movign forward through time, which everyone does, and backwards, which is increadibly difficult, and its more likely punching a hole in time is likely to lead to the past taking a shortcut, extremely enthusiastically?Especially if teh universe is expanding?
We wont be seeing anny more of the Flim Flam brothers, due to them being snakeoil sales ponies?
4501014 you say that like it's a bad thing.
4501085 No, I say it as an impartial Canadian observer.
Completely ridiculous. I appreciate your effort of steering the fandom away from the thought that the writers run out of ideas and that thus, the show will go downhill now, especially after all the wrong accusations of that happening during Season 6 already, but, what you say here is equally suitable to make the fandom panicking. If you know this fandom's history, you know there were a lot of "Hasbro ruined the show!" assumptions already.
The theory you come up with here is outlandish for quite a number of reasons:
1. The USA are not a suppressive regime, not even with Trump. At least, not yet. There is absolutely no danger that the US government would crush down on Hasbro or DHX for having a message in an episode that criticizes Trump or his politics.
Granted, Trump could try, the man is stupid enough for that. But in a democratic country, attacking the producers of a TV show for not liking implied, negative commentary about him or his politics in an episode, would lead to a greater scandal than his questionable way to treat immigrants.
Suppressing freedom of speech like this would get him impeached swiftly and hard.
2. While Trump was elected by the majority (unless the suspicions of vote manipulation are true, that is still open) and has a lot of supporters, he also has a lot of opposers on the other side, who enacted massive protests against him already, right after becoming president, and gets criticized and ridiculed from all sides.
With those many anti-Trump people, it would still be safe enough for Hasbro to let such episodes air.
And even if his supporters would react sour on such an episode, with how much Trump gets ridiculed and attacked from all sides, they probably wouldn't even dare to stir up any trouble, out of fear they would get ridiculed themselves then. They won't risk that backlash, now that everyone looks down on them for voting Trump in the first place.
3. My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic had a lot of controversial messages already. How about criticism of the public school system and its methods ("Testing, Testing 1, 2, 3", S4) or a very straightforward criticism of the industry's mass-production of goods ("Canterlot Boutique", S5)? Both of which criticize things that are much more important to people and much more ingrained in society, and thus, more likely to make people upset than criticism of Trump's infantile ideas of how to run a country.
4. And, finally, the election arc of the official comics. This arc had Mayor Mare (= politician with experience) and Filthy Rich (= businessstallion without any experience, just a lot of money) run for mayor of Ponyville.
In which Mayor Mare tries to win votes by her experience and Filthy Rich tries to win with his money, by promising the ponies of Ponyville all sorts of stuff that he can easily finance with his vast amount of money. The arc also has Filthy Rich completely ridiculing himself when he tried to save money with the things he promised to build, resulting in those things to collapse really soon and even hurting ponies, so that Ponyville got riled up against him really quickly and put Mayor Mare back into office. That he promised to build things can even be seen as a commentary on Trump's promises of building a wall.
The analogies to Trump and Hillary Clinton are not hard to see.
And this arc got released in September and October of last year, just shortly before Trump got elected.
Granted, he wasn't president yet there, but he already had his following there and despite that, Hasbro greenlit those issues for release and it didn't result in backlash.
And the official comics have evidently an audience as big as the show, but still, nothing happened.
All those factors combined make clear that Hasbro would never hold back episodes of the types you described because of fearing backlash or reduced sales.
And this is not even going into detail yet how doing this would result in a massive undertaking that late in production of the season, which would definitely have led to a delay of the season's start from Spring to Summer.
The horror scenario you describe here is just not possible, all things considered.
4501134
Just as a reminder Trump was NOT elected by a majority of the citizens of the USA. He was elected by a minority BUT he did manage to capture the required number of electoral votes in the electoral college.
The electoral college is the one that actually matters in terms of being elected but it is important to keep straight that Trump is a minority elected president and he is not the first. The most recent example of this was the most recent President Bush in 2000 who also lost the popular vote but won the electoral college.
I would have loved this so-called "lost episode," that probably doesn't exist, to be about that portal Starlight was opening with Sunburst.
Also, this post does somewhat seem like a thinly veiled excuse to write an anti-Trump story at the end...
Setting my prediction now: The thing that will cause the most debate in this comment section is not wether or not Donald Trump is a good president, but on the last Ghostbusters film.
4501152
Then there's even less reason to worry about Pineta's theory.
4501272
My comment has nothing to do with agreeing or not with anybody's theory. My comment was about not forgetting simple truths about the election and one key one is that Trump was not a popularly elected president.
4501477
And yet it served my point. With only a minority of voters behind him, there's even less reason to assume that Hasbro would fear any backlash for airing episodes with certain themes.
Or, more probably, the new script editors had orders from On High to play up Starlight Glimmer's role in the show more, so instead of a big event right after a big event for SG the writers used two episodes to re-define her role and to give her more spotlight.
Contemporary politics likely had nothing to do with it.
Honestly I found this opener kind of refreshing. Wouldn't it be more indicative of production laziness / the-show-going-downhill if they'd opened with another monster of the the
weekseason, like they have the past six times? I know it's a solid trend and that they've done very well with it thus far, but I'm more impressed that they bucked it and gave us a really good (and long time in coming) character piece. This wasn't one of the so-so "somepony missed obvious" episodes. Twilight found herself in Celestia's horseshoes in a more fundamental way than raising the sun or running Equestria: she found out what it's like to truly be a teacher with an exceptional yet imperfect student in a very imperfect world. It's a riskier, more mature episode, akin to Amending Fences but with one of the foundational character relationships of the whole show. I will say that this one wasn't at the same level as Amending Fences, though.4501014 Did they need an excuse?
4501051 All motion is relative. Well, there's a caveat or two but they're rather technical so for most practical purposes all motion is relative. Since the theoretical spell was fixed on a particular object, what you're saying would work only if the object itself was in space (which is admittedly possible). My guess was that they inverted the spell so that instead of sucking tghe desired object to the present, it sucked them into the past. 'Course it wasn't real anyway.
4501604 Good points all around. I liked this as an opener partly because it was so different. I like to see things shaken up (shook up? I think it's shaken...). In the rest of the points, it was not as good as Amending Fences imo (though I'm a bit biased on that for reasons that require too much explanation to get into), but it does deal with a rather adult theme of a teacher/student or parent/child relationship when the latter is at their time to move on. This is particularly adult as kids under 18 are unlikely to have any experience with that side, and I worry it may fall flat for them. We see a little bit of the child/student side in worry about the teacher/parent not being there for them anymore, but it's only lightly touched on.
Anyway, for the original post, the word 'bland' is probably denotatively appropriate, but it tends to have negative connotations. In modern 'western' society, though, I can't think of a synonym that doesn't have negative connotations. I'm not sure I like what that says about us. It's a small step from finding peace boring to finding war exciting...
4501021 Very, very much true.
4501134
Actually, production budgets are much longer than is made out here which be the real reason.
MLP scripts are turned in like 1.5 years pre-airing, voice recording is done like a year in advance, and then animation begins.
So if we assume this happened, we suddenly have them having to write, record, storyboard, and animate two entire episodes in a production schedule that's pure crunch time, since even if they air as episodes 23/24, that's still looking at a ~9 month start -> finish schedule.
Potentially possible, but half the time of what it normally is. Pony isn't South Park.
4501697
Exactly, as I said in my last paragraph. They wouldn't even have time for that, especially considered that they are already working on Season 8 right now.
4501653
Maybe the word is 'calm'?
Agreed on Amending Fences. I just edited my original post to reflect that.
4501940 Hmmm. Calm isn't quite the flavor I was looking for but it is probably the closest positive-connotation word.
Adding that sentence was hardly necessary as I don't thiiink you expressed an opinion on which was better to begin with, but it's always nice to find people who agree with you. XP
4501152
Fun fact: at no point in the history of the United States has a president ever been elected by a majority of the eligible voters, let alone citizens (a category that include people like children and felons who are not eligible to vote). Voter turnout has never been higher than 82.6% (according to this dataset), which would require a candidate to capture more than 60.5% of the popular vote to have been elected. That has only happened three times since 1824 (popular vote data was not recorded before 1824, and before 1824 most states weren't relying on the popular vote), and the turnout in those years ranged from 56.2% to 62.8%. Lyndon Johnson had the highest popular vote % and the highest of those turnouts (61.05% and 62.8% respectively), which still comes out to under 40% of eligible voters.
That's not to say that Trump's victory wasn't unusual. Losing the popular vote but winning the presidency has only happened five times, and losing the popular vote but winning the electoral college is actually even less common (in the 1824 election, nobody got a majority in the electoral college so the election was decided by the House).