Welcome to Season 8. Here's a PSA. · 4:07pm Mar 24th, 2018
(this isn't about the premiere, as of this writing i haven't seen it yet and i suspect most people still haven't)
Cold in Gardez, one of the few people on this site with a user number lower/earlier than mine, has had this line as their bio for forever:
Stories about ponies are stories about people.
It was true seven years ago, and it's true now.
Ponies are people. Except for the rare moments when ponies are plot devices, ponies are freaking people. And they're written by people.
And people do stupid stuff.
They're gonna do irrational stuff. They're gonna do illogical stuff. They're gonna do stuff that doesn't make sense. They're gonna do idiotic stuff, and they're gonna do stuff that you don't like seeing on the screen, or that you wish weren't part of the canon, or whatever.
And yes. Often, there's an underlying "reason" behind it. Every once in a while, that reason is indeed "because then there would be no movie" and you just gotta throw your hands in the air and move on. Sometimes that reason really is "they're just a shit" and you still gotta move on.
But those two instances are way less often than we think. Usually there's a reason.
But you know how you don't find those underlying reasons?
By approaching people like they're logic problems to be solved.
I mean, that approach is cute to see on a dorky anime girl (oh heavens is it) but the arcs given to those characters tend to end with them learning to give into emotion and the fact that people are messy including themselves and look now Lucca's been crying for years inside because her mother's a cripple.
You don't need some kind of theory that "ponies (mares specifically? great generalization there, buddy) lose their brain cells if they don't feel loved enough" I mean fdsdosajfsanf;lonfadomci,h THAT'S ALREADY PEOPLE AND THAT'S LIKE HALFWAY TOWARDS THE MOST BASIC FORM OF EMPATHY 101 AND YET THAT'S LIKE STILL SO MISSING THE POINT I DON'T EVEN
Like why would you try to boil people down and make them so uninteresting to explore
Ponies are people. Roly poly balls of experiences and loves and hate and vices and traumas and happiness and internalization. You can't apply some blanket plot rule and expect it to explain people. You can't use if-then statements on organics. All people, all ponies are different.
And that's what made them popular.
Anecdotal, sure, but back in 2012, the first Everfree Northwest, a bunch of us con-goers were gathered in a big room and we all decided to just raise our hands and talk about why we loved ponies. And the main and biggest reason cited in the room was that they were flawed people who did kinda dumb stuff a lot and the room freaking cheered.
Because ponies acted like people. Ponies were people.
This was refreshing. Especially if you grew up in the age of kids TV where "everyone must be a shining role model" and anything mildly heavy lesson-wise was a "very special episode". It limited the sorts of lessons that could be taught.
We didn't expect the ponies to have to learn to pretty much be not racist about that zebra who lived in the forest and didn't never hurt no one. We didn't expect allegories to be handled both that deftly and that hilariously. It never was before on kids' tv. We didn't expect a season finale to be entirely about disappointment. We didn't expect ponies to be completely stupid and forget to mention having a family member. But it was consistent and it fit and it led to just this massive expansion of stores you could tell and lessons that could be taught to kids big and little alike. It opened up so many more and new sorts of characters that could be seen and explored.
Characters eerily like the viewers.
Ponies are people.
And no matter what complaints we as omniscient viewers who totally know how to solve all characters' problems like to lob at the screen?
Ponies are us.
Enjoy the show.
And if you don't, it's okay.
There's always next week.
~B
Oh dear. Has it already begun?
Horse-Drama beginning everyone. But seriously, Bookish, damn great blog!
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If you mean have any episode reactions happened, doubtful. It's too early for most people to have seen the premieres yet.
This is a response to something else.
4823952 Ah, woops. I just figured since it was premier day. ^^;
I love when people do blogs like this. It's great when you need warm fuzzies.
And now I feel I should apologize.
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Ehhhhh... I mean... you didn't make those original posts? ^^; I'm not much for putting folks on blast, ever. But that pic did freak me out a little. I had to say stuff.
If it helps, this post was a long time coming.
That's why Fame and (Mis)Fortune is great because it's essentially this blogpost in episode format.
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that episode was so fucking good
I hate how often these days I find myself defending creative decisions I don't particularly like simply because some people have chosen to dislike them for the *wrong reasons*.
For example,
I'm not a big fan of the new Star Wars, but people who dislike them because of the minority characters or the "Rey Is a Mary Sue" thing are idiots.
And while I think Twilight founding a weird friendship school thing is taking the show in a direction I don't like, I've already encountered *more* idiots complaining about the show moralizing about inclusivity and not-being-racist, despite that being a Thing The Show Did all the way back in season 1 and periodically since then.
I'm not sure if thats exactly the type of horsedrama you are currently dealing with but if so godspeed to you!
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Excuse me, how dare you suggest that acting irrationally is the best course of action for any situation ever? With your blog post, my perfectly rational and well-thought headcanons of how every single character ought to act is now invalidated and I will post a hot take that will get an equal amount of upvotes and downvotes and start an argument that will go on for pages.
This was a good blog post.
4824042 Chipping in here to say I agree wholeheartedly. Also:
Is one of the dumbest reasons to dislike something. Dislike the story? Fine. The pacing? Valid. The fact that TFA started out with an interesting plot about finding Luke but they ditched it to fight Death Planet even though the former would've tied in with TLJ and probably made it infinitely better? Extremely valid. Annoyed at the decision to have Luke fall a bit? Eh, personal quibble, but YMMV as with all media.
The minority thing is just stupid. But it's the world we live in now, I guess. /shrug
This.
Literally, just...all of this.
It shows up in a lot of different places, in a lot of different forms, but there is this very frustrating desire that I keep seeing to take the ideas of Narrative Structure and Thematic Integrity and transform them into Logic Guides by which you can reduce any given character or narrative to a Rube Goldberg device where things interact together purely in a simplistic, mechanical manner. And I mean, far be it for me to tell anyone they're Doing It Wrong, but it just feels t'me like that's a really reductive way to engage with stories and characters that denies one the ability to connect with these stories at a more meaningful level.
So yeah. Definitely feeling you especially keenly on this one.
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I'm of the opinion that the show has been getting better, growing in scope and growing up as time goes on. I'm utterly confused when someone says they don't like [X] episode
WHY. CAN'T. I. UPVOTE. BLOGS?!
And frankly, there is so much space left for character-driven episodes that a lot of shows lack beyond the maguffin of the week.
Tanks for the Memories, for example.
That’s why I enjoy this iteration and even the episodes with a bit of overdone cartoonish portrayal still have character moments of growth or doubt (I’m looking at you, Party of One) that forms the major frame of the week.
But not every type of story is for everyone. There are people that dislike Alicorn Twilight and those that think she made it better. Starlight is just a carbon copy vs Starlight being a chance to explore a different angle of a concept. Applejack keeps going through the same lessons vs different aspects of her characterization.
There are going to be duds. There are going to be great examples. Personally, I’m hoping for a “Future Imperfect” episode, but that’s likely not going to happen in the remaining show run.
Still, I agree wholeheartedly and am going to end this comment before it goes any longer.
Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Let people enjoy things and have their own silly theories and reasons for why things happen.
I shall wait for next week, and maybe try these two episodes again in a month or so.
Agreed. This is why successful tv shows/movies are successful, and why unsuccessful ones fail. When the writers start adding things and doing things just because they're cool things, the watchers wander away.
My Little Pony is Gilligan's Island. The most successful episodes are those which one character is faced with an issue and deals with it the way the character would, and the other characters react appropriately. That's one reason Harry Potter took off and ran like a roadrunner. The characters *reacted* to their environment and other characters in the way that matched their personalities.
I'm not sure what prompted this, but if you're having to make an impassioned plea in defense of everyday human experience, I suspect I don't want to find out, either.
I grew up watching boy cartoons and it was always a rule that the (token) female characters were almost without exclusion these perfect paragons who were not allowed to screw up; or if they were allowed to screw up, it was in profoundly uninteresting ways. That's one of the major reasons I glommed so hard on Pony when I saw it.
Somebody linked me to that on Discord with a comment about "OMG, AMAZING INSIGHT!" and I just kept waiting for the "amazing" part where somebody laid out the to-me-blindingly-obvious insight that this was how real people actually really function... but no. It was just some kind of weird-ass "worldbuilding" attempt to explain things by making ponies different from humans... by giving them a trait that is totally human? It was baffling and weird and like... do you people ever interact with human beings at all, ever? Or at least have you ever taken high school psych and heard about Maslow?
Edit: Also while I'm half-ranting about this, the use of mare and stallion in the original was weirdly off-putting to me? Like... it flew so close to the real "people need to feel loved to pursue their higher needs" Maslow thing, that casting it in this heteronormative, strangely sexist, mares need a stallion's love way was just kinda icky. Do stallions not need mares to love them too? Why is it only the feeeeeeeeeeeeeemales (read this in your best Ferengi voice) that need love in order to think straight?
I think the Joker summed it pretty well:
c1.staticflickr.com/4/3246/3056871500_14f7fdff18_b.jpg
The show is going to do silly things. And some, like not sending Starlight and Trixie out into the world*, aren't the best choices. But I find it best to set that aside and enjoy the equines regardless. Partition the ol' noggin, keeping enjoyment of ponies separate from analyzing the tartarus out of it. That way, I can have my Marzipan Mascarpone Meringue Madness and eat it too.
Except for Magic Duel. That episode sucks so much that it is the one that taught me that valuable lesson
* Seriously, how awesome would that have been? Giving her a chance to forge her own path and be her own pony, rather than being Twilight to Twilight's Celestia, all coupled with lots of world building and lots of Trixie... it would have been glorious. But oh well, I still enjoy the Starlight episodes regardless.
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The Mary Sue bit is understandable, actually. A Mary Sue tends to break immersion. And if a story doesn't keep you immersed, of course you're not going to enjoy the story as much. Rey does have a lot of Sue traits, so for some people, she'll break the suspension of disbelief. I tend to consider that sort of make it or break it factor in a character being a Sue or not. A character can have all of the traits, but if the character doesn't take you out of the story as well, all is fine. And as with all things, different people will be impacted by different parts of the story and characters in different ways. That doesn't make them idiots. It just makes them
poniespeople.Okay, good, I thought that 4chan post was not that great. >.>
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Yep. Society's gotten... better, I think, in that regard, but the mentality of treating women with kid gloves is practically coded into the language and hard to stamp out for good.
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It should be! Shit's creepy.
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Fair enough: I do agree that she is unusually competent as far as characters go, but NOT as far as main-characters go. People have told me with a straight face that Rey's feats are more impressive than Anakin's or Luke's.
Anakin and Luke who, on their first time getting in the cockpit of a spacefaring fighter jet (Luke was never allowed to join the pilot academy and Anakin is what, 10 years old and has only flown atmospheric racers?) manage to singlehandedly land the decisive blow that won an epic space battle.
Luke, the farmer's son who can pull grappling cables out of nowhere to batman-swing with a princess in his arms across bottomless pits and who holds his own in firefights against trained imperial soldiers (yes, stormtroopers are useless to make the story better, but you can say that Rey's obstacles are also made easier to tell a better story).
Rey beats Kylo Ren! But of course she does because of how injured he is: a cut on his arm, a hole blasted through his gut (honestly the only way his intestines arent falling out is probably from him force pushing them back in), he just killed his own father, and you know what? She was still losing and on the defensive for most of that fight! The camerawork goes to great pains to show all the disadvantages Kylo Ren is working under and just how difficult this fight still was for Rey... and so when people call her a Mary Sue for this then yeah, I think its safe to call them idiots. Yeah, they're ponies/people, but sometimes ponies/people are also idiots.
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Yeah, this was the conclusion I came to after rewatching TFA last month alongside TLJ. Like especially with all the reveals/non-reveals/twists TLJ brought to the table and how she's being played right up against Kylo Ren it really put Rey's character in perspective for me. Everything Rey's done and been up to this point makes sense in terms of how character arcs work and/or how the SW movies have played out over the years. I am super hyped for Ep 9.
(Disclaimer: my opinion on TLJ is that it's a Knack 2-level 9/10 mastapeeece which makes TFA retroactively better, and I was Fine (tm) with TFA already. The complaints... I... if I got into them I'd be here all day >_< But 95% of them come down to metafiction always being risky and the easiest path to audience unrest.)
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Fwiw, this doesn't have anything to do with the season opener if this blog is scaring you off from it. This is referring to a thing that was over on Reddit. It's also interesting in a meta sort of way at least two authors here that I follow and highly respect are on very opposite sides of this thing.
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wait wait wait
are you telling me
boys have emotions
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Saw that too and I had to step back for a while and wonder what even... Like... No. It came across to me as rather stupid and felt, to me, sexist throughout.
I thought about trying to use the headcanon in a story and actively recoiled from it. It made even the simplest character feel like a lifeless Chinese room whose only reason for existing was to interact, and when interaction was over, do nothing more.
I have since tried to purge it from my brainmeat with limited success.
4824336 impossible. :0
What the heck happened?
Preach!
4824336 just about girls.
Spot on, Bookish! You just said what I believe most of us have always felt. We fans can relate to the characters of you Little Pony because they are us. Good, unique and different with our own flaws and pasts. But we see past those things and embrace the good and different and messy about each other and love each other anyway.
It is the Pony way, the way of the herd, the way of the fandom.
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Oh, she definitely blows both away, in terms of ability.
Luke is established as being a good pilot. He plans to go to the academy, bullseyes whomprats in his T-16, and even tells Han he's not such a bad pilot. And when actually in the pilot's seat, he gets a bit fried on his first attack run, has trouble spotting the Tie Fighters, and needs to be bailed out by Wedge when one is on his tail, because he can't shake it. Anakin's trip is worthy of Jar-Jar. He accidentally hits the auto-pilot, which has somehow been programmed to take him to the battle location. Then he loses control of his ship, accidentally parking it inside the hanger bay. At which point he accidentally shoots the torpedoes that blow up the reactor because he happens to be facing in just the right direction to do so. So Anakin's sequence is bad for other reasons (though he is a super competent mechanic/engineer, for some reason, something pretty much ignored by any film/show after TPM).
I don't think it is Rey's piloting that gets people, though, although her being that good at flying the Falcon is a bit silly. To be honest, what bothers me more about that sequence is Finn's incompetence. His going for the bottom turret instead of the top one. You know, the one on the side where you can shoot up at Tie-fighters, rather than down into the ground. And then later, when that turret gets disabled, how he doesn't have the sense of mind to move to the other turret. He's really quite incompetent in that sequence ;) No, what gets people about Rey is just the combination of factors.
I do agree that the lightsaber fighting thing isn't too much, as Kylo has been blasted by the bowcaster, a weapon that the movie retcons to be quite a bit more powerful than it was in the original trilogy. But there are other things, like her ability to learn force abilities without training, and a lot of them. Anakin had years of training before we saw him use anything other than the passive enhanced reflexes. And Luke received some training in extending his senses/trusting his feelings, which allowed him to use his one shot. But then there's Rey. She force pulls the lightsaber. She Jedi Mind tricks. She flips Kylo's mind probe on him. She breaks previously established canon as to how the Force is learned, and there is no explanation for it. Heck, there's none in TLJ either, though the book tries to say it is due to Snoke's mindlink he established, which is a flawed idea for a variety of reasons I won't go into here. There are her linguistic skills. She happens to understand the right astromech to get BB-8. She understands Wookie, a rare language (and not the actual name of the language, but whatever). That would be fine, if say they'd shown her hanging out with a Wookie in the desert camp, but nope. She just happens to understand two languages hardly any person would (Luke, for example, relied on his X-wing to translate what R2 says in Empire, despite growing up on a farm with lots of droids and having been with R2 for a while). There's Leia hugging Rey (two people who have never met) instead of Chewbacca (the guy who has been with Han longer than her). And other factors as well.
A lot of it is because Abrams is a bit sloppy in his writing. He tends to want to do something cool, and doesn't do the support work to make it fit in, or to think through the implications and ask if he should actually do it. He does the same sort of stuff in the Star Trek movies, though it doesn't impact the characters as much, as he's using established ones, rather than creating new ones. He has, for example, admitted that the hug was a mistake, that Leia should have hugged Chewie. A screw-up/oversight. But that sort of thing is typical of him. He could, for example, have had Rey's dinner scene at the camp been with an old Wookie or at least had her greet one. Boom, why she understands Wookie established, and it wouldn't bother anyone. Likewise, if she was established as being a bit closer to the leader of the camp, her knowledge of and ability to use the Falcon would make more sense. But it is that sort of detail that Abrams is bad at. But on the flip side, he's pretty good at creating a nice thrill ride. Just needs a partner to offset his weaknesses.
But anyway, it's about the straw that breaks the camel's back. And once broken, every other thing stands out that much more. So again, while I personally am fine with Rey (though I do think her ability to outlearn "The Chosen One", he who was supposedly fathered by the Force, needs a darn good in movie explanation), I can fully understand why people say she is a Sue. There are plenty of issues with her character.
But enough about that. That's another fandom.
Speaking frankly: with the hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of uber-competent guys and/or hero's journey dudes in fiction and more coming out every day and the fraction which exist of female protags in comparison, you'll forgive me if I have little sympathy for the Rey = Sue criers.
Too many of these "issues" I see brought up regarding her character and power set come down to 1=1 bulletpoint comparisons of protagonists of entirely different stories. The Mary Sue argument is wearisome and trite.
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Ah, I am not on reddit, so I thought this was about issues with the new season and the path they are going with it. About people being flawed, ponies being flawed, all that stuff.
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It just comes down to if it breaks the suspension of disbelief. And I also think there's a secondary factor. That being that there are often a lot of little things that people might not like about something, and ultimately, enough of those little things build up to break the camel's back. But then a single something gets selected to be the poster child of the dislike. For TFA, Rey and her ability to learn the Force in a way contrary to what the previous movies have established is that focal point.
And to connect that to your original post, I think people have a tendency to be too binary these days. All those thumbs up and down on the internet, as well as posts in various places (posts tend to work best when strongly worded, and they get muddled when you try to go into the grey, as can be seen by my bit of rambling with this parenthetical statement). Even Netflix dumped their five star system for the inferior thumbs, because people have too much a tendency to give five stars to what they like and one to what they don't. TFA has flaws. Pretty much any movie does. And a bunch of those flaws are related to Rey. But it is perfectly fine to be able to see those flaws and still like the movie. It is perfectly fine to dislike a movie, but to see what it does well. I like TFA quite a bit, but can point out a large number of issues with it. I can do the same with the prequels (and I'm hardly alone in that), but still like those too. Others might not like something, and I can understand where they come from, because I can see many of the issues they have, even if they don't ruin my enjoyment of a movie.
Everyone wants to be on a side, even for silly things that don't really have sides. Yay for human tribal nature. It's okay to admit something isn't perfect, people, and still like it anyway. It's okay to see a flaw and shrug it off. And it's okay to admit that something you don't like has some good points.
Personally, the male protagonists that bother me the most are the headstrong anime ones, the ones without any or much training who are always rushing in to fights, never learning, yet somehow persevering. Such bland, boring, and annoying characters, and ones who should wind up dead in their first fight, and if not that,their second. Hate those guys, and I wouldn't like it any better if it was done with a female protagonist. Still love "Record of the Lodoss War", though, despite its main character being one of those guys.
Hello hello hello [/humblebrag]
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(omg the rumors were true welcome back
)