May
23rd
2017
It's Been A Long Day. · 10:19pm May 23rd, 2017
Lauren Faust is doing a DC Comics cartoon show.
My computer is currently stable. I have also ordered parts for a proper upgrade. Twice, in fact. The first time they were sent to the wrong address.
A thought I had last night: a lot of science fiction is based on world history. What if we inverted that and instead pitched historical fiction based on famous SF stories?
"It's Star Trek, but in biblical times!"
"It's Dune, but during the Norman conquest!"
"It's The Matrix, but with the Protestant Reformation!"
Honestly, I think there is a very eccentric short story anthology in that...
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Daedalus Aegle · 237 views
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Oh man, I will totally watch that. :O I really liked Super Best Friends Forever or whatever it was called. Sad there wasn't more of it. :C
Also, I just finished the fourth episode of American Gods. At this point I feel confident saying that, while there is lots of sex and violence, it is not there for entertainment in the Game of Thrones mold, but is instead there to be unsettling and uncanny. I'm okay with this.
All hail our glorious leader, Faust!
Hopefully this show doesn't go the way of Teen Titans Go!
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All hail!
The early airing of episodes has made me unsure when to comment on them. Which is a shame, because there is so much to comment on.
Something that struck me while watching "Hard To Say Anything" and "Fluttershy Leans In", to do with some genre theory. While I've amused myself by inverting fairytale gender roles in "Pumpkin's Big Adventure", "Hard to Say Anything" makes it quite clear that even though Equestria is a country ruled by immortal demigoddesses, and may or may not have a population where mares greatly outnumber stallions, their traditional gender roles are not so different from ours. Princesses get abducted. Knights rescue them.
"Fluttershy Leans In" in particular was criticized for this, for having a message that seemed out of place in the seemingly more egalitarian world of Equestria (this same criticism has been given to other MLP episodes and comic issues over the years). I think this reflects a divide between the expectations of the fanbase and the creators.
Fantasy fans have a love of cohesive worldbuilding for its own sake. They want a carefully constructed world, free of internal contradictions, with its own problems and challenges flowing naturally from its construction. So any element of the real world intruding in a way that seems at odds with the rules of the constructed world is an error, subject to external criticism.
But that's probably not how the creators see it. They're not really writing that kind of fantasy story. They're writing what is still a children's cartoon show with kid's show lessons at its root. And their goal is to tell stories that are relevant to the lives of their target audience. That means acknowledging the issues of the real world, rather than those unique to Equestria. Because nobody in the audience is a magical talking pony, and everyone in the audience is a human being living on Earth.
This is posted here as a comment rather than as its own blog because I thought this was insightful but once I'd written it out it seemed completely banal, and I can't tell if it's because of what it is or because of my skills as a communicator.
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Well, I'm not sure how many people will see a comment like this, as you've added it much later than the original blog post. I basically only saw it because I just realized something I wanted to share here: Considering the voice cast for the Super Hero Girls web series, there's a good chance we'll have Tara Strong voicing Harley Quinn and Poison Ivy in this new show.
But in regards to your observation: I see it pretty much the same way. Thing is, MLP may have a fantasy setting, but at its core it's a Slice of Life show. So yeah, it's more important to the writers to make it relatable than to construct a cohesive world.
Though I don't really see your point where "Fluttershy Leans In" is concerned. I don't think that had anything to do with gender roles per se. It's a story that just seemed to come organically out of Fluttershy's previous character development, regardless of the gender of anyone involved.
Now I get what you mean about "Hard to Say Anything." You'd think that in a society that leans more towards the matriarchal side, it's the mares who are the more proactive ones in seeking out romance, that it might even be more the norm for a mare to propose to a stallion than the other way around. (And who knows? It might be. We haven't seen Mr. Cake propose to Mrs. Cake, Shining Armor to Cadence, or even Cranky to Mathilda. Although, granted, their weddings did put them in VERY traditional gender roles.)
But I don't think it's quite fair to sum it up with:
Yeah, the Princesses do get abducted a lot. Then again, Shining Armor has also been put under a spell during the Canterlot Wedding episode, and the one to do the rescuing was Twilight, who is neither a knight nor a stallion.
I think MLP does its best to diversify gender roles. We've seen stallions act girly, and we've seen plenty of mares exhibit more masculine traits. There's even some hints here and there that stallions are considered the weaker sex. (Remember RD telling Big Mac that she wasn't gonna take it easy on him just because he's a stallion at the Sisterhooves Social?)
So, to sum it up, I'd see it like this. MLP is a Slice of Life show (for the most part). With Slice of Life comes certain tropes. (You do a wedding or a romance episode, you're expected to do certain things.) And those traditional gender roles you mentioned are usually attached to those tropes, or they won't work. So it's kinda unavoidable to have that in the show. But they do tend to mix that up where there's an opportunity.
Maybe it's also got something to do with the seniority of the writers. Sometimes it feels like those who have been on the show a while are more willing to go with a twist on something traditional, while new writers will generally prefer to stay in the bounds of established things. (Of course I'm grossly oversimplifying. Sometimes it's the other way around, where a new writer is more likely to take a chance. But I think what I said before is more in line with a general trend.)
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That's alright: I pretty much just wanted to post it somewhere for my own thinking. I may include it in a bigger blog later.
That thought had crossed my mind
I'm looking forward to it.
It's a lot more indirect in "Fluttershy Leans In", yeah. But apparently the title is a reference to a movement for encouraging women to take on leadership roles. The implication seems to be that mares find it harder to have their ideas taken seriously in the workplace than stallions
Some of the cast and crew tweeted in that direction as well after the episode aired.
MLP is a very feminist show, of course. In general it depicts a society with little or no gender stereotyping, where it's taken for granted that of course mares are equally capable in every arena (and even sometimes hints that maybe stallions are slightly discriminated against). But on the other hand you can get episodes like these two, that show real-life gender stereotypes being harmful, and teach ponies to stand up against them. It's still feminist, but from a cohesive world-building perspective, there's a contradiction. Personally I'm all for it.
I think part of the reason "Hard To Say Anything" stood out to me is because of the format. Fairytales are such an evocative medium for teaching stereotypes to children, and Sweetie Belle accepts the Damsel in Distress/Knight in Shining Armor framing completely uncritically. While it's true as you say that these are established tropes in real life, when that whole genre is included in Equestria that suggests a lot... I may have fallen into the very trap I was discussing, though, by thinking of fairytales in Equestria as world-building rather than as real-life relevance
Okay, this is another reason I didn't make it its own blog. I wasn't really sure where I was going with it.
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Ah, alright. I wasn't aware of that. But I still don't think the episode itself bears that out, considering one of the three contractors is a mare and the one who does listen to Fluttershy without reservation is Big Daddy McColt, a stallion.
But we've also seen hints about other fairy tails. Consider the story of "Gusty the Great" that we got a glimpse of in "Flurry of Emotions."
So I don't think it's really accurate to say MLP is feminist to begin with. You wanna see a feminist show, watch Supergirl. That show sometimes shoves its message so far in your face that it's even obnoxious to me, and it hurts the characters in the process.
MLPs goal is supposed to be Harmony. And while the male characters in the show sometimes get the shaft, they also have their moments. Likewise it represents women as people with flaws and strengths alike. As far as fairy tail concepts go in this world, it seems to be more diversified as a result. Because some mares like Rarity, and I think that's where Sweetie Belle gets it from, actually enjoy this idea of a charming prince coming to sweep them off their hooves. And there's nothing wrong with that. Just as there isn't anything wrong with liking stories that have a female hero that you'd want to identify with, see RD with Daring Do and Twilight with Gusty the Great.
So MLP is showing us a mirror of our own world to some degree, but it also tries to show us how our world could be better. So I don't consider MLP feminist as much as I consider it a real equal opportunity society. In Equestria, it doesn't matter wheter you're a mare or a stallion, whether you're earth pony, unicorn or pegasus, whether you're pony, dragon or changeling. You're allowed to like the things you like without judgement, and you're really only judged by how well you treat others. And I think the show has always maintained this philosophy, even put it to the test with Thorax, Zecora, Starlight and Discord, even when tropes from the real world stray into the narrative.
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See, to me all of this:
These are all feminist values. I agree with all of this, and it's basically what I was thinking about when I say this is a feminist show. And it's not coincidence that the show is that way; it's a result of the fact that the show is made by a bunch of outspoken feminists, Lauren Faust first of all, who are committed to showing that girls can do anything, and that things girls like can be awesome. It might not say it quite so explicitly as other pieces of feminist media, but the ideas are all there.
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I guess I just don't really like the word feminism. This interpretation of feminism we're talking about here is fine and something I can get behind. But far too often things are taken to extremes under the label of feminism. When certain media put women on a pedastal or belittle male characters to make female characters look better, then that's no longer something I agree with.
There should not be a need for one gender to make itself look better than the other, or the need to proove anything. So what I see (or perhaps more accurately, what I want to consider) as the philosophical foundation of MLP isn't feminism, it's humanism.
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Feminism gets a very bad rap. I won't say that bad behavior never happens, because it's a big umbrella and people under it disagree with each other a lot. But I do think this is one of those situations where the loudest people get noticed most, even if they're not representative. I think MLP is a lot more representative of mainstream feminism, the kind that most feminists actually believe in and which has the most influence in the movement. In my experience the worst feminists are a tiny powerless fringe that nobody listens to, and who get most of their publicity from right-wingers who are actively opposed to gender equality and want to use those examples to make all of feminism look bad.
I don't really think there's any media out there that's more feminist than MLP. But because MLP doesn't actually use the word, and is very non-confrontational about it, a lot of people don't notice. I see the ideas of feminism and social justice in it constantly, though. To me, those few lines like "Don't think I'm gonna go easy on you because you're a stallion" is when the show is at its least feminist. Not cool, Rainbow.
Regarding the word "feminism", that's a great big debate all to itself. And I could go on about this forever, this is one of my big buttons, but I try not to go tedious. To sum up, to me feminism means equality, and while it's a movement by women to fight for women's rights, I think men benefit greatly from it as well. And I think MLP is on board with that.
ETA: And on another topic entirely, there's an animated Castlevania airing on Netflix in July