My Little Pony: A Retrospective and a Look at the Future · 8:55pm Mar 4th, 2019
When I was eight years old, I had a My Little Pony picture book. That was the only pony-related thing that I had when I was a child, and I had no real interest in the series. If you had told me then that one day, I’d be obsessed with the franchise, I would have laughed at you or called you crazy.
As you all know, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic is about to reach its final season. Even though I haven’t been actively involved with the show in a while, I wanted to talk about the show, the Brony community, and how both of these saved my life.
My first introduction to the show had to have been in early 2012. I was a freshman in high school around this time. My brother and I had recently discovered fanfiction.net, and I soon noticed that my brother had a My Little Pony story listed under his “favorites”. I asked him about it, and he eventually admitted that there were parts of the show that intrigued him. Out of curiosity, I did some digging, and discovered that one of the villains was voiced by John de Lancie, also known as Q from Star Trek. My brother and I were raised to love Star Trek, so of course we had to watch “The Return of Harmony” one day after school. In the middle of the second episode, our father walked into my bedroom and saw what we were watching on my computer. He stormed out and didn’t speak to me until the next morning.
I thought, at the time, that I should always be honest and frank with my parents, but that opinion changed after I announced that I was a Pegasister. Our father was furious. He told me, “You’re not watching My Little Pony.” (His language was more colorful at the time.) He reduced me to tears over breakfast, and I went outside and stood in the freezing darkness, waiting for the schoolbus, hating my life. I texted my mom later and told her to tell Dad that I had been joking, that my brother and I had only watched the one episode because John de Lancie voiced one of the characters. She believed me.
I don’t remember why, but after I came home from school that day, I watched the rest of the episode. I liked it.
And when John de Lancie’s character returned, well, I had to watch that episode, too.
I soon realized that the Brony community was vibrant and energetic. I fell in love with Brony musicians (Eurobeat Brony and Aviators are still ranked highly), I read countless stories, I joined PonySquare and created a pony OC. I can’t exactly describe what it was that had me addicted, but it was like all of the positivity, all of the support, all of the inspiration within this fandom was bubbling over, spilling into my life and making me feel like I was part of something wonderful. I felt like I was accepted.
At least that’s how it was when I was at my computer. In the real world, things weren’t as lovely. In high school, I was miserable. The teachers laughed when I walked into classrooms with “Kick Me” signs taped to my back, and I was eventually bullied so badly that I began to eat lunch in the school library. My love life was a whirlwind: I was cheated on, verbally and emotionally abused, and eventually bullied even more when my tormentors saw my lack of a boyfriend as a way to harass me. (“Hey, did you know that today’s National Coming Out Day?” “Whatcha reading? Is that a book about what it’s like to be gay?”)
In the privacy of my room, I could connect to people who were in similar situations to mine. I watched Shining Armor and Cadance get married. I watched the Crystal Empire get liberated. I watched Twilight Sparkle become an Alicorn princess. I watched her and her five friends learn important lessons about their respective Elements before a new castle emerged for the Mane Six and Spike. I was there for Equestria Girls, and I saw Sunset Shimmer’s transformation to run-of-the-mill high school bully to a true friend and worthy counterpart to Twilight. I thought that the show was sublime and that things were going to get better in terms of quality.
After high school, I started college. I remember the fifth season premiering the summer before I moved into my dorm, and I remember feeling annoyed with the introduction of Starlight Glimmer. I shrugged her off, along with the first two episodes of the season. Season five was, for the most part, a good season. I loved “Amending Fences”, “Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?”, “Slice of Life”, and “The Mane Attraction”. However, the finale left me with conflicting emotions.
I also found myself with mixed feelings about the third Equestria Girls movie, Friendship Games. I won’t go into too much detail about it here, as I’ve already done that in the author’s notes of my story “She Didn’t Use the Memory Stone On You”, but I’ll give a brief recap: I felt that the writers had introduced Twilight Sparkle’s counterpart to the series because they didn’t think that Sunset Shimmer would carry the series as the main protagonist. The fact that the merchandise was already giving her Alicorn wings, even though she hadn’t mastered the magic of friendship yet, felt like a slap in the face to me, a huge fan of Sunset Shimmer. I won’t go on about this again, because I’ve talked about it in another blog.
In that blog, I also briefly talked about Flurry Heart, whose introduction to the series was enough to make me say, “Enough is enough, I can’t watch new episodes anymore.”
And since Flurry Heart was leaked to the Internet, I haven’t watched an entire episode of My Little Pony, any of the Equestria Girls media, or the theatrical pony film. But at the same time…
I couldn’t stay away.
I’ve been lurking on Equestria Daily and the show’s wiki, still following the story and watching things go from bad to worse. I’ll admit that there were times when I was tempted to watch an episode (“Stranger than Fan Fiction”, “The Perfect Pear”). I would return to pony fan sites and interact with fellow Bronies, but I’d rarely discuss the show itself. Eventually, this website was the only place that I was really active.
In my opinion, there are three eras to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. The first era consisted of the first four seasons and two Equestria Girls movies. The second one was an era of transition: I actively watched the show’s fifth season and third Equestria Girls movie, but I was becoming unhappy with what I perceived to be a drop in quality.
The show was there for me to get me through my breakups, the horrible bullying I dealt with at school, and the death of my best friend. If it hadn’t been for this show and the community, I’d probably be dead.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this show since I found out that the upcoming season is the last one.
I’m putting “Princess Rainbow Dash” on hiatus. I really and truly want to finish the story, and hopefully I’ll be able to one day. I know that there are a few people who still care about the story and want to see it reach a conclusion, but please, please understand:
I have so much to deal with already, and the emotional attachments that I have to the show can’t be a part of my life right now. I have to let it go. This doesn’t mean that I’m leaving forever, and it doesn’t mean that I’m going to forget about you all and what you’ve done for me or how you’ve inspired me, but if I force myself to do this, the quality of the story will suffer, and everyone will be miserable. I’m hoping that one day, I’ll come back, but for now, I think the best thing for me to do is to just leave the story alone.
I’ve posted a link to my main fanfiction account now, where you can find stories for various cartoons and video games. And one last time, from the bottom of my heart:
Thank you. Thank you for showing me what friendship could be. Thank you for sharing its magic with me. Thank you for staying with me during the worst years of my life...and for giving me hope. You are all fantastic, incredible, loving individuals, and I’m so lucky to have met each and every one of you and to have had you read my stories and help me grow as a writer.
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
I wish you luck on wherever you proceed from here. I have a similar background and introduction to the series, so I can at least somewhat understand where you're coming from. I've got nothing better to do with my life, though, so I still jot a word or two of fan-fiction whenever depression allows.