The Ultimate Liveblog · 8:19am Oct 20th, 2019
okay
WELL
certainly I watched a season and a half of episodes after the last liveblog without having anything to say, but even after those, I've let myself get pretty far behind again. And I have this odd feeling this is the last time1 I'll ever be able to catch up like this! At least until I get around to watching Filly Funtasia, obviously. So, let's see if I can figure out where I last left off, and thereupon figuratively RAM A BUNCH OF PONIES INTO MY EYES. And not even just the same old six (nine? eleven?) ponies either, the world's gotten seriously expanded since the olden days. Does anyone even care about background ponies anymore? Are they still needed in a time when the show has thrown far more canonically named and characterized ponies at us than ever lurked around the corners of the first season? Who needs Dizzy Twister when you have Zipporwhill? Who needs Lemon Hearts when you have Princess Cad-thingy? Who needs Caramel at all?
right, uh, liveblogging, right, let's do that thing instead of whatever I'm talking about
The Last Laugh has a really great opener that gives Pinkie a respectful and serious (but not too serious) perspective, and it does some other good stuff too. It would have been easy to make the assistant dude an evil vizier instead of a friend (or more than a friend??) who truly wants the best for Cheese but doesn't know how to provide it. There's an interesting line about halfway through about Pinkie taking over the factory that sounded a lot like metacommentary on the show ending (and not under the direction of its original creator). But mostly my reaction to this episode was that, for once, IDW did it better. And, uh, years earlier? Laugh, Ponyacci, laugh...!
2, 4, 6, Greaaat: Excuse me, magical dampening rings? That's quite the invention to drop into canon at the last minute with no fanfare. But, uh... Twilight old pal? Princess of Friendship my main lady? Prophecized wise leader of all Equestria? Little bit of feedback. Could you maybe not deliberately make five of your most trusting students miserable for days next time you want to teach your friend a cryptic lesson with no apparent provocation? Like, is this really all that much better than your behavior in Mare Do Well?
A Trivial Pursuit: Yeah, um, Twilight, followup question from last time: you've got how many episodes left before Celestia thinks you're ready to rule the entire nation? Pinkie again got some nice sensitive handling, but otherwise this is just getting painful. Surely we have some good episodes somewhere in this last batch? It might help if we tried giving Rarity at least one spoken line?
The Summer Sun Setback comes at the worst imaginable time in the season, delivering its lesson of "trust Twilight, she's calm and wise and all-capable" immediately after the best counterexamples in recent memory. But hey, there's a fig leaf of a throwaway line to justify that, so I guess I should move on. Rarity finally makes her debut in the second half of the season and kills it. (I don't laugh at MLP too much, but her insistence that frills were out of style was perfect.) Despite Rarity's sudden revival, however, Starlight may be genuinely dead. The mere mention of Appleloosa makes me remember Little Strongheart. Cozy Glow is a lot of fun in small doses and her team's dynamics are really working for me right now. Some of the weather scenes were pretty cool. Things are looking up on the writing front.
Interlude: A conflict that's always been fundamental to My Little Pony (at least in G3 and G4) is that the main characters are adults with the minds of children. They have clearly defined societal roles and responsibilities, except for Fluttershy. This has enabled MLP to tell an interesting variety of stories in an interesting variety of settings, representing childlike conflicts through things like metaphor, instead of blithely setting every single episode in a school and hoping to retain viewer interest somehow. (This is not a commentary on Equestria Girls, which seems to have moved on from conflicts to music videos: another excellent solution.) However, their jobs still all had the benefit of being a little bit abstract. We never really saw Applejack feeding poorer families, for instance, or anyone actively depending on there being clear skies. Rarity's fashions and Pinkie Pie's gags were all luxury items. Nobody ever borrowed a book from the library. For all that the characters had seemingly adult jobs, they were also not immediately essential to the continuance of society, which was convenient because it allowed them to have adventures or mental breakdowns without any external considerations.
But the show has been allowed to evolve, and so too have our main characters. Rarity began with Coco (<3) and worked her way up to owning a veritable fashion empire, with employees who actively depend on both her creativity and her paychecks. Rainbow Dash's job as a Wonderbolt may be less useful to pony life than her job as a weather pony, but it's a more specialized position, and she works in a small team with lots of direct interactions. Twilight and Starlight run a school and are entrusted with the minds, hearts, and lives of literal children. If they're getting more responsibilities, they need to mature accordingly; for this evolution to work, the characters need to actually be adults in mind as well as body. Therefore, every time they regress for the sake of an ersatz friendship lesson, it's much more jarring than it used to be. Social isolate Twilight is free to drive herself into madness worrying that she hasn't written a letter to Celestia, because her actions have no consequences; headmaster Twilight is always just one mistake away from starting an international incident. So we can't keep doing this week after week. If MLP can't commit to the risks it takes on, like the school or Celestia and Luna's retirement, then maybe it's time for it to end after all. Certainly this is hardly the first time Twilight has been given an upgrade and then the show has been unsure how to handle her afterwards.
(WINGS please don't ban me)
Worse, all the above focuses on the main cast and assumes they're the ones being presented as relatable figures. But MLP's ostensible audience is little children, and little children tend to go to schools. We have characters these days who go to school for them to relate to: the Young Six. So when there's an episode with Rainbow Dash and Applejack being utterly unqualified to lead an expedition, or Rainbow Dash being completely unsuited to coach cheerleaders, isn't there the danger that the viewers will see these episodes through the eyes of the Young Six instead, and be taught the lesson that it's okay to put up with terrible teachers so long as they learn about friendship at your expense?
Interlude #2: From Team Cozy Glow's discussion at the end of last episode, it sounds like maybe we're approaching a breakdown of relations between pony races? On one level, this makes total sense--it's a return to the days of Hearth's Warming Eve, the (possibly somewhat mythologized) beginnings of modern Equestrian civilization. But on another level, this is something the show has very rarely tackled at all, because equality has always been the name of the game. Watchers of the show, though, have always noticed that unicorns seem like they should be more powerful than anyone else--notice they can win a game of Buckball just by removing two of their magics, because nine seasons in we still don't know what earth ponies are good at. They're generally associated with land maintenance and food production (in the world of My Little Pony, baked goods are fundamental food items) but it's never been made clear if they have some affinity for that or if there's just nothing else for them to do. But while the earth ponies and the pegasususususueses provide necessary services to the final Summer Sun Festival, the unicorns--who used to be in charge of raising the sun--are nothing more than decorations. On some level, decorations are all that unicorns have been to pony society since the arrival of Celestia! So it makes perfect sense for Cozy Glow & her Amazing Friends to target this potential source of dissatisfaction... but it should also be interesting to see how the show addresses this issue it's always, always managed to ignore.
She Talks to Angel follows apparent season trends of introducing disturbingly powerful magic and deciding to have otherwise moral characters put others in danger (did Zecora get an elephant eaten??), but if you pretend the magic potions were supposed to be a placebo and only accidentally swapped their bodies, then this episode was a lot of fun. Sure, maybe in this silly fantasy world wolves really can survive on carrots, who knows really? A spotlight episode for the one character you'd never expect to get one! With spoken lines, no less, finally confirming that Angel truly is no angel. And it is a pleasure to see the show taking advantage of how big its cast really is these days to fill things out... there was definitely a period Zecora in particular showed up hardly ever.
Dragon Dropped is just a solid MLP episode, and one that makes sense to include in the final season. Fantasy setting with a lot of elements drawn from the gradual accumulation of canon over the years, coupled with a thoughtful and sensitive presentation of a complex emotional topic. Or two topics, arguably, if you think Rarity's jealousy is not quite the same thing as her taking Spike for granted. But they end the episode much more as equals than they've ever been, with Spike showing no signs of either servitude or unrequited love (an always-kinda-uncomfortable subplot that I can't say I miss), so that's a great place for them to end up, not too dissimilar to Fluttershy and Angel's resolution last episode. Besides which, there was lots of Rarity doing Rarity things! She really does have those couches captchalogued, doesn't she? And was Gabby always this adorable?
A Horse Shoe-In I liked a lot, though I don't know whether it would do much for little kids. Even aside from the concert everyone's been waiting to see for years, this whole episode was such a great testament to the strength of character growth, while also repeatedly acknowledging that getting older doesn't make you good at everything. After disappearing for eight episodes straight, Starlight comes out of nowhere to, well, agree with me about everything. And there's nopony more trustworthy, uncontroversial, and universally beloved than Starlight Glimmer, so I'm pretty sure that means everything I said in that first interlude was right! Anyway.... mmmm! It's hard to put into words how good a well-written Starlight & Trixie episode feels, like there's so much trust and communication going on even when they're fighting. It's such a huge evolution from their first appearances, and I say that with admiration as someone who took a long time to think of anything for Trixie to do besides be an evil antagonist.
Daring Doubt... you know what, sure. All the Daring Do episodes run together in my head, but this is a decent Baby's First Anticolonialism Message. MLP genuinely is quite dedicated to reforming as many of its villains as possible, isn't it? Although "reforming" isn't even the right word here if it's everyone else's minds that had to be changed about the big blue guardian dude. But what's going on here in general? Obviously having active villains kind of gets in the way of a message of Friendship Friendship Always Friendship, but is part of the idea also a showcase of how much Twilight and her friends have changed the world? (And who's next... the Diamond Dogs?) Look, audience, there genuinely aren't serious threats anymore, or at least there won't be once Cozy Glow and the Cozettes are defeated--you don't need to worry about Equestria? It'll be fine forever? The story cannot continue past this point because there is no more story left? Harry marries Ginny and they all live happily ever after? It's hard to know what to think about that in an age of stories that maybe don't work that way so much. But just because there'll be no more villainy someday soon doesn't mean there won't still be the ongoing practice of friendship, so there's that. "But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing..."
Growing Up is Hard to Do feels like it would be a better fit for characters who haven't spent their last several episodes showing that if there's one thing they're really good at, it's giving other ponies advice. Out of context, though, it's a fairly fun episode with writing that only sometimes dips into total heavy-handedness. Fluttershy's explanation of experience at the end was effective. I'm actually kind of surprised this episode introduced new characters (and a new species) at this eleventh hour, though, surrounded by so many other episodes dipping into the annals for cameos... well, I guess there was Trouble Shoes for a moment there, so it's really a bit of both. Will the purple whirliboi be the very last new character introduced in My Little Pony? Let's find out!
The Big Mac Question is yeah, well done, good choice, makes sense, but I don't really care about any of the focal characters so I don't have much to say. I had been wondering if Mayor Mare was still alive so that's nic--LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON LYRABON "best friends" my ASS
The End of the End is totally perfect
The Last Problem resulted in not so much a lump in my throat as a lump where my throat used to be
Look, I'm sorry, I've got nothing, there were just too many ponies rammed into my eyes for any sort of great coherent thought. Did the various group scenes feel heavily weighted toward the characters/species introduced in the last three seasons, further setting them apart from the rest of the show? Yeah I guess? But looking back, it's not like there was really anything happening in most of the seasons before that. The odd character got introduced and made enough of a splash to stick around, like Maud, but mostly it was not terribly distinct from Faust's original formula of lots of slice of life with the occasional adventure (especially at the start or end of a season). Their biggest set pieces were mostly there to sell toys... remember Rainbow Power? LOL, of course you don't. The last two or three seasons, with the movie's help, really stepped up their efforts to tell a coherent story, in particular doing so by engaging with the show's major themes on a far grander scale than ever before. And while there were definitely filler episodes that might better be termed failure episodes, as a whole, by gosh, everything worked. This was just so satisfying. I've been watching this show (with, admittedly, decreasing regularity) for eight years now, and I'm not the same person I was at the start, and I'm glad these goofy little technicolor ponies aren't the same ponies they were then either. They've helped me change in some important ways, though that's a story for another time, and I'm glad they got everything they dreamed of in return.
(are these my ideal endgame ships? okay, no, but let's be honest: any canon lesbians are fine. also there could have been more sunset shimmer buuuuuuut I'll live.)
1: Not really the last time. Apparently there's something called "Best Gift Ever"? And "Rainbow Roadtrip"? And a bunch of associated shorts I'd never heard of? And I'm sure I'm way behind on EQG too, following that franchise got much more confusing when it dropped the big movie tentpole scheme. I think the Dazzlings are around? Y'all know I love those assholes! Life goes on.
Speaking as someone whose ugly competitive streak only comes out when playing inconsequential tabletop games, I had zero problem with the contrast between "A Trivial Pursuit" and "The Summer Sun Setback." Some people really are at their worst when the boxes open and the cards come out, sometimes so they can be at their best when it matters.
In any case, I have plentiful YouTube links to shorts both human and equine if you need them.
I don't recall if I actually made this comparison myself, but no wonder I hate that episode. :B
It's just Equestrian for "fiancee". :V
Looking back, it occurs to me I checked out of the toyline when everything got redesigned around the time of the movie, so none of the new ponies/dolls were compatible with the old ones anymore (and also Toys R Us closed down). So I don't necessarily know what all has been feeding the toys more recently. I remember liking the Kirin episode a lot but it 100% felt like something that wouldn't have toys made... otherwise, idk.