Simple Poll on the nature of Evil · 7:32pm Sep 17th, 2019
I actually have plenty in the pipeline for the newer episodes, and my backlog. But I wanted to post this immediately after The Summer Sun Setback, with relevance to Cozy Glow.
Do people not enjoy Cozy Glow? Obviously she won't have as many fanfictions about her as Sombra got. For the same reason the Phyllis won't get as much fanart as Peewee or Tom. Which is a HUGE shame.
But back in August, Lop Oddity gave us this excellent sketch. Accompanying it is her plans for incorporating the two characters into her expansive fan universe. But there's also venting.
...Can we talk about what a bizarre, clumsily-conceived villain Cozy Glow is? The choice to make a child villain seems so jarring in the syrupy-sweet world of My Little Pony. Cozy is depicted as this ruthless mastermind, a vicious xenophobe, a domineering, power-hungry dictator. But why? Why is she written that way? Equestria is shown to be pretty much a peaceful utopia with a few xenophobic undercurrents, but slowly moving into an egalitarian and inclusive future for ponies and non-ponies alike. Cozy Glow has no tragic backstory, no provided motivation, no real reason to desire power and want to drive out the non-ponies......she's just evil, I guess. That's some pretty bad writing. :/
In that page's comments section are plenty of other people who dislike Cozy's implementation, and have made their own extensive backstories. I was really surprised. Do a lot of you dislike Cozy Glow's existence in the show?
I enjoyed getting a pony character that was just instinctively evil. Not just disgruntled or sociopathic, but a pedal-to-the-metal supervillain. When even the parents are scared of what they spawned. I suppose it just reminds me of the TV characters I grew up with, with Vicky from Oddparents, and Mandy from Grim Adventures.
Even Elmyra from Tiny Toons to an extent (not that she was filled with malice per say, but definitely a selfishness that brought a ton of pain). Then there's all the child villains in Codename: Kids Next Door. As a kid, I felt empowered by seeing shows were kids, or very childish adults, could get things done. So I never felt like it was "punching down" when kid villains got defeated. And even when child characters WERE put in jail, I never read that as a serious recommendation on criminal justice policy. By that logic, Friendship is Magic is pro-solitary confinement for how Nightmare Moon was jailed.
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"A routine soul smear confirmed the presence of pure evil."
I was laughing my butt off when they threw Cozy in Tarturus! I prefer a powerful and spontaneous conceit to some half-hearted, vague reasoning for someone's existence. My primary example of the latter, as much as I liked having an excuse to bring him back, was Celestia telling the Mane 6 to release Discord. How did she believe that Discord's magic could help Equestria? Was there some kind of precedent for that? Did Celestia and Discord ever use to hang out? Discord is suppose to be a three-dimensional reformed character like Starlight and Thorax. But with those two, we eventually see things like how they grew up, and who molded them early on. I'm still unclear if Discord even HAD parents, or he just spawned from the ether. And of course, tons of people took issue with Starlight's awkwardly explained origin with Sunburst, and took it as the show trying to handwave her horrible acts. (Yet they love the Sirens, who had purposefully been making humans miserable for a millennia, but that's another blog post...)
Given that I'm a dude who spends most of his online time viewing pony content on Fimfic, YouTube and DeviantArt, I appreciate the sweet syrupy-ness of the show. But I can appreciate a wider range of thought, and I'm super fond of the characters that subvert it. The kind of dryness we can get from Gallus, Discord, Smoulder, Ember, Spike, Gilda, Pharynx... all the non-fluffy characters, I suppose. So I enjoy the one pony that just goes "Fuck that noise." Doesn't mean that I wouldn't like to see her parents. But the villains I always wanted to see origins of were Tirek, then Chrysalis. With Tirek I just wanted to know if Scorpan would get his own story, and to find out if there's a whole land of centaurs and gargoyles. For Chrysalis, to see how much of her refusal to reform is just her upbringing or not, and explore her relation with the hive. Did she know that their physical transformation was even possible? Was she just purposely trying to keep her people down? Why did she decide to have her people step out of the shadows, and become military despots? Origins tell us about the character sure, but when done right tell us their environment; and we already know SO MUCH about Equestria, I want to see some other part of the world.
(Although before any of the Legion of Doom, I'd have preferred the origins of the Princesses or Discord.)
Some people also see Cozy's antagonism to the Student 6 as evidence for her being a xenophobe. She was definitely being super condescending to them in What Lies Beneath, but there didn't seem to be a kind of reactionary fear there that we see from political firebrands and conservatives. I'm not convinced she wasn't just going for their insecurities for the sake of screwing with them. She tries to set the whole school on them, but that was in response to them stumbling onto her plans. Cozy actually seems to have an egalitarian bent to race. "They can ALL serve me!" Seems to be why she's playing mediator for Tirek and Chrysalis.
I enjoyed your perspective, especially the part about child empowerment.