Help! My Heart is Full of Pony! - Looking Back · 5:39am Mar 7th, 2019
After my first few years of involvement with My Little Pony fan community I started burning out pretty hard. You wouldn't necessarily know it to read my essays or to follow the Facebook pages I administrated. I always tried to keep it positive. However, over time, I came to strongly dislike a lot of the choices that the show was making.
When I went to Big Apple Ponycon 2015 however, I came back invigorated. I decided to re watch the whole series (which back then was 4 and a 1/2 seasons long).
I loved it - even episodes that I hadn't liked the time first time around. I still had objective criticisms, but they ceased to ruin my enjoyment of the show as a whole.
I came to realize that a big part of my love for the show was the memories I had built around it. Friends I hadn't spoken to in years got in touch with me out of the blue, and we established weekly rituals of geeking out over episodes every Saturday. I also spread my love of pony to other local friends who hadn't been exposed to it at all. There was Love and Tolerance. The charity work. The music. The community. The memes!
Most of all I got to discover Equestria through the eyes of my daughter.
The early years will always be dearest to me, but when I re-binged the first five seasons, I found that I had made new memories around the later stuff too.
Now I find myself in much the same boat, rewatching Seasons 5-8 after a similar decline in interest, and rediscovering them. It's kind of amazing how nostalgia can build up around little things like this. I know that MLP, at the end of the day, is still just a TV show, and I like to think I'm fairly well grounded in "the real world," considering the mountains of responsibility I juggle every day.
However, there's something magical about these stories, and I realize now that, apart from their own virtues, they have personal value to me as bookmarks - memories that coincide and overlap with various events in my life over the last 8 years.
I look forward to the final season. I look forward even more to binge watching the entire series once another solid block of time has passed.
What a long strange trip it's been.
-Sprocket
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I feel that 9 seasons (and a bunch of movies and specials and whatnot) is enough that when the final bow is tied and I rewatch it all again there's going to be stuff in there that I've plumb forgot about. It's going to be a fun experience.