Looking Back - The First Episode · 4:22am Aug 29th, 2019
The Following is part of a series reminiscing on the past episodes in preparation for the series ending.
You can find an index of all the entries here.
Anypony who's been following my blog knows that I've been upset lately as it’s fully dawned on me that the show is coming to an end. After the series finale in October, it will be over, forever, and part of me is having trouble coming to terms with that.
I thought it might help to talk about that a bit, and I figure the best place to start is when I first started watching the show, but before I can do that, I have to get into a bit of context.
People who followed me for a bit know that I didn't have a good childhood. In fact, I would say that between late 2001 and 2009 were the darkest years of my life. The feelings of fear, sadness, loneliness, and helplessness were all the constant for those eight years. I think it's safe to say that I went through more trauma by the time I was 18 then many people go through in their entire lives.
In 2009, I graduated high school, and that fall, I finally moved out of my parents' dysfunctional household and into the Freshman dorms in college. There, away from my parents' issues, I finally had some time to decompress from it all. I made quite a few friends there, more than I've ever had in middle and high school, including Rob, who is important to this story. In May of 2010, I moved out of the dorms into my first real apartment, with Rob as one of my roommates.
Now, as most people in the fandom know, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic came out in October of that year, but if I was aware of it at the time, I don't remember. The first time someone told me to watch it was in November.
The college we went to was built in the middle of a massive nature preserve, and one of the things Rob and I had bonded over in our freshman year was walking around at night. One Night in November of 2010, Rob and I were walking around on campus when we passed a dorm building where another of our mutual friends lived, and I called him on my cell-phone (a flip phone, because those were still a thing at the time) to tell him to come join us. Some of the people reading this would know him as Wolf Nanaki.
I had met Wolf Nanaki through a mutual friend shortly before leaving Fort Lauderdale for college, because the three of us would all be going to the same school.
Anyway, he came down and was walking around with us, and at some point in the conversation he said that we needed to watch a show called “My Little Pony”, and that it was really popular on the internet right now and had been made by someone who was famous for Powerpuff Girls and Foster's Home. Now, at this point, I had been to his family home in Fort Lauderdale, and I've seen his room, which had been filled with Tomodachi and Thomas the Tank Engine merchandise, so I took his recommendation with a grain of salt. Rob, on the other hoof, wasn't aware of this, so his response was "I guess I'll have to watch it then."
I didn't really think much more about it until a couple weeks later, when Rob came back to me and said that she'd watched an episode and I would really like it.
At the time, I had been pretty into the webcomics Ozzy and Millie and Tales From Mynarski Forest, which had ended in the previous years, and was, by that point, a moderator on the official forums for Housepets, which I followed closely from 2009 until some time in 2015. I had been working on a side-scroller at the time, Marco the Raccoon, which I never managed to finish, but had been praised for its portrayal of wild animals. I also had a thing where I would watch old animated movies that I either hadn't seen or didn't remember, like Disney's Robin Hood. So it was no secret that I was into this stuff.
Anyway, December rolled around, and I went back to the east coast for winter break. My parents had lost the house and the apartment they'd moved into by that point, and were now living in my grandma's house. One night, after they'd gone to bed, and I didn't feel like going to sleep yet, I went to watch something on my laptop, and remembered that I had been told to watch My Little Pony. Back in those days, the show was notoriously easy to find on the internet, so all I had to do was search YouTube and I got the pilot episode.
So, there I was, in my grandmother's house, adjacent to the shambles of my parents’ trainwreck lives which I had gotten away from, closing the door on the darkest part of my life, off of drugs and into therapy, watching the first episode of My Little Pony at the age of 19.
And I wasn't that impressed.
Even to this day, I feel like the first episode is one of the weaker ones, and at the time, I felt that the plot was so childish and cliche that I wouldn't be interested in watching if this was the entire show. However, I really liked the execution of it: the art was incredibly visually appealing, the voice acting was clearly good quality, and the characters managed to feel three dimensional. I figured I might as well stick with it a bit longer to see how I would feel about it if I watched a couple more episodes, so I looked up a list of the episodes that were out at that point in time on Wikipedia. (the other places were they are listed didn't exist at this point, and I still use Wikipedia out of habit to this day) I had found Applejack to be interesting, so when I saw that the plot of "Applebuck Season" centered around her, I decided to watch that. This was around the point where I started to realize that the show had a lot of potential: that episode didn't really amaze me either, but it was funny, entertaining, and made me feel like I could really get into these characters.
When I got back from the break, I told Rob that I'd watched a couple episodes and thought it was pretty good, and he said I should keep watching, because it builds over time. He was also doing this thing around the apartment where he would randomly half-sing "Winter Wrap Up, Winter Wrap Up!", which was from an episode I hadn't seen yet, so I wasn't entirely sure what that was about.
Eventually, I got around to watching the episode "Look Before You Sleep", which I still consider to this day to be the first great episode of My Little Pony. It floored me that they had managed to take a plot about them having a sleepover and make it a legitimately interesting exploration of the characters. I found myself getting invested, and eventually, I put together my first fan club for the show, which was basically a bunch of us getting together to watch the new episodes as they came out.
Oddly enough, that February, my parents got on a Skype call with me to tell me that they were getting divorced. They were worried that I might be upset about it, as were my friends at the time, but I was more upset that they had let it go on through my entire childhood.
In any case, that's pretty much where it all began, and from there, I kept watching the episodes as they came out. Friends came and went, projects either took off or collapsed, I held a few different jobs, and I went on to graduate college a few years later. That entire time though, My Little Pony had been a constant interest: I've been watching My Little Pony for most of my adult life, and it's been this constant source of comfort in the bad times as I've worked through the traumas of my childhood and experienced more as I got older, and a source of entertainment during the good times, a funny yet wholesome show about interesting characters living in a fantastical world. I guess that's why it's so hard for me to come to terms with losing it: it's not just a show to me at this point, it's a major part of my life, something that has been there for me, almost like my oldest friend, and the season finale in October basically marks the end of its natural life.
Anyway, that's pretty much how it stands right now. I might write more of these, I might not. I kind of hope I do, because honestly, I feel like I have all these interesting thoughts going through my head that never really make it out when I'm just thinking them to myself, and as I said, this is something that's important to me.
I'm working on a few things right now, and anything Pony related is taking priority as I feel the pressure of the series ending like a deadline on some of these fan works that I've been letting slip. When I started them, I didn't think I would be writing them as the show came to an end, but then again, it just never felt like the show would end.
Until then, I hope everypony else is enjoying the final season as much as I am, and that you remember to watch and talk about it with friends. After all, if there's one thing the show has taught us in the past eight and a half years, it's that Friendship is Magic.
Do you have a story about how you started watching MLP? Tell me in the comments!
The show might be ending for G4 but there is still more to come. We'll miss the characters we grew to love and will still love them no matter what.
Be happy this series has an ending at all. Heck this is the first mlp series that has an ending. The others just went oh were done canned.
5113346
That's true. The original MLP appears in a few other cartoons as an off-gag about a show they never wrapped up...
5113349
So yeah be happy it lasted this long. This is the first series of MLP that lasted this long.
5113350
At some point I'd like to talk about how the series was almost cancelled multiple times, starting in season 3.
5113450
It's ok if you went on long: I'm writing these so we can all share in coming to terms with this.
5113546
Ah I never knew that of course I never really payed much mind to the fandom or to what Hasbro did. I didn't really get into the show till season four.
5113547
So, the reason season 3 was only 13 episodes had to do with contracts and numbers and how, after a show hits 65 or 100 episodes, the rules change. I'll get into it in the next blog post...