Thoughts on Generation 5. · 4:18pm Aug 28th, 2019
I think we can all agree that Generation 5 should start fresh, right? With no expecting it to fit into Gen 4's shoes.
Before Gen 4, before Faust reimagined it with her watermark of writing, Pony was an infantilized girlish joke. It embodied being a 2-6 year old girl and running around with paper machae on your head and princesses and magic crystals and talking soft fuzzy creatures.
Everybody associated My Little Pony with that. Absolute saccharine sweetness and femininity and rainbows and giggling and childish voices from grown adult voice actors. Utterly pointless episodes about milquetoast subjects such as sharing or caring. You know, like a 22 minute toy commercial for babies is.
FIM broke that mold by actually sneaking in nerdy references and some mature themes handled in a rather wonderful way. I have to again point at the episode about Bright Mac and Pear Butter. Or Yakkety Sax when they chased the phoenix. Or the Big Lewbowski references.
The culture that Lauren Faust brought in on that project and all the more vague people that came after her (Yes I know their names. Shush.) wanted their Show for Little Girls to be more complete. To have more appeal. To appeal to the more mature and sophisticated.. little girl. So that the two year old watching it could enjoy it with the 8 year old and not feel like she's being patronized by her old cartoons.
We really can't expect that again. It was a flash in the pan. Gen 5 can try to imitate it, but being honest, FIM rode on the coattails of everything that came before it since about season 4, maybe season 5. After Tirek, it just lost itself. There were some fun stories, but it just wasn't the same.
FIM felt like it was a saccharine peek into a big high fantasy world. And at times, it absolutely was. But, these were just feelings.
It had the potential to go outside those lines. That's partly why we loved it. We knew sometimes it actually could and did go there, even if 18 out of 22 episodes never did in a season. It referenced going outside those lines. It left that option open, or at least, appeared to.
Generation 5, I feel, will snuff that out. And you know what? I'm okay with that. It helps make G4 special and different. It'll still have some of the old tropes of monarchies and princesses and crystals and such, but they'll reign that in. It'll go back to just being a 22 minute toy commercial.
But for gods sake, Hasbro, make your plastic worth buying. Chinese bootlegs were able to produce better quality, more show-authentic merch than Hasbro. Of course China has the labor and raw materials, but that's not the point. Hasbro is cheap.
The worst thing that could happen is that Generation 5 tries to appeal by Going Woke. And I don't just mean by leaning left-wing, because that's fine. I mean groanworthy episode ideas like, commentary about capitalism from an obvious direction that's been hitting the Marxism a little hard, or some heavy handed lecture about "patriarchy" that really just translates into shit talking men for being male. You know, to connect with 'the kids.' And platform the franchise to a young audience.
There was a joke/troll post about one of the episode for Season 9 featuring a herd of zebra fleeing from their homeland because of a catastrophe, and the native ponies raging about these "unwanted foreigners." It walked Poe's Law pretty hard, because lots of people honestly could see that being a thing with the wrong writers at the table. Urrggh.
So, I guess knowing the potential of awful that a followup to Gen 4 could bring, I'm comfortable just hanging about in the sandbox that is Gen 4.
While I don't want G5 to be an imitation, I do want to keep some of the charm and tone of FIM. I hope it's a worthy successor to FIM, while still being it's own thing.
Faust and her team revolutionized the MLP franchise so that everyone, regardless of age or sex, could partake in it. To go backward would only destroy it.
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Yeah, but to not go backwards risks tarnishing the memory of what they attempted to do even more.
We're very likely never going to get a do-over for G4's ending. It is what it is. And it ended kind of like seeing a wonderful baby grow up into an abused and scarred person. Bittersweet. I'd be okay with G5 dialing it back a bit. If only to spare some poor hearts.