Help! My Heart is Full of Pony! - Let it Rain · 10:07pm Feb 19th, 2019
When I first saw the pilot to MLP, it kicked open doors inside my brain and broke down walls inside my heart. There was something uniquely magical about the sun and moon mythos in particular. It functioned on fairy tale logic - a type of storytelling that is specifically designed to tickle your subconscious and hit you somewhere primordial.
While the show has told countless beautiful stories, and has introduced us to countless likable characters, and given us countless catchy songs to hum to ourselves at work, in my opinion, nothing so far has matched the prologue when it comes to the use of that Jungian myth logic
That is, until Sounds of Silence.
It’s rare that I write a Heart Full of Pony essay simply to rave about the execution of an episode, but this story was far greater than the sum of its parts.
MLP crafted a parable.
The lesson is the age old problem of taking the good with the bad. It’s advice that most of us have probably heard hundreds of times in one form or another – advice that most of us logically recognize as being solid, yet hardly ever manage to internalize. It can take a lifetime to learn properly.
The beautiful thing about this particular lesson is that, like any good fable, it’s equally applicable to children as it is to adults. Autumn Blaze is a perfect conduit for this message, not just because she’s charming and funny, and moves the story forward, but because she herself is the living essence of the moral. Think about it.
Autumn didn’t choose a life of solitude simply to keep her voice. It was deeper than that. She chose a life of sorrow in order to continue to experience joy.
Her sunny disposition makes it easy to downplay how hard her solitude has been on her, but in reality, that bliss is built on sorrow. Autumn is so extraordinarily lonely that she speaks to inanimate objects. However, she still fully embraces that loneliness. She doesn't go to the Stream of Silence and seek to rejoin her kirin clan. Instead, Autumn searches for beauty in the world despite and because of that loneliness. She has seen that the alternative is a muted existence - a terrible numbness.
Just look at her great philosophical speech upon looking at a rainbow – how we are all part of “the everything.“
It’s a zealous, blissful, invigorating way of looking at the world, but she would never have arrived to it had she not had so much time on her own to think. Her pursuit of joy may have caused her exile from the village, and with it, a life of material sorrows, but her courage in embracing this way of life is the very thing that strengthens her optimistic outlook.
Autumn Blaze is a living embodiment of the moral of the story.
By caring about her, and investing in her dreams and struggles, we can more closely identify with the theme and lesson on a personal level. That's the power of allegory, myth, and symbol-based storytelling.
How many pop songs generically use the analogy of rain being a necessary component of rainbows? How many of them fall completely flat? When Autumn Blaze sings it, that same analogy magically comes to life.
I was going to write a thorough deconstruction of the allegory of the kirin/nirik, and the inverted baptismal imagery of the stream of silence, but found that it's far better simply to celebrate the episode itself and its message.
The fandom has gone wild for kirin with a passion and enthusiasm that I haven't seen since the early years, and for good reason. Sounds of Silence truly succeeded in crafting a new parable that resonated strongly and deeply with millions of people.
That's awesome.
-Sprocket
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I quite agree with you, Sprocket. This was a great episode with a very good message. No other show I've watched has ever come close to reminding us all, young and old, that in the end, friendship does make the great differance in out lives!
I had not consciously seen that, but now that you point it out, it is, indeed, rather awesome; thanks. :)
I did enjoy this one a lot as well, but I did not agree with the Transcendentalism religion that they put into Blaze's character. It could be attributed to just being coincidental, but it was literally stated.
I thoroughly enjoyed the kirin charades scene, heh.