Friendship is Magic · 8:28pm Mar 15th, 2020
The show's finale aired and the dust has settled for several months now. In the past, when a season ended, I have always felt a bittersweet mix of anticipation and anxiety. With the status quo changed I look forward to and dread the season to come. Now, without another season coming, I find myself with an entirely different feeling: one of reflection.
Among the things that were always prominent in MLP:FiM has been this shiny sense of wonder. Seeing adorable ponies, wanting to see more. Hungry for more. As the seasons progressed and we got more, the ravenous curiosity waxed and waned. Not content to wait for more to air, the fans have been driven to create. To focus on what isn't there but should be or could be. It has been easy to focus too hard on what is missing and turn to complaint or criticism. The banalest of this comes in the form of getting that which has been missing but jadedly declaring, "We should have gotten that sooner."
I'd like to take this opportunity to instead look over what we did get. Just what was this wonderful thing we watched, dreamed about, impregnated our fantasies with, and welcomed into our lives?
On the mundane surface, it was simply a cartoon. It was produced explicitly with the intent to appeal to little girls mostly preteen in age. The decisions in terms of character and content were made with that particular appeal in mind. While many of us outside of that demographic found it enjoyable anyway, too many arguments have taken place with the premise that it should have met higher standards than it did. Assertations that because it exceeded some expectation here or there means that it should have remained consistently above a certain bar are useless and petty.
From another view, it was a collection of stories. It would be nice to try to imagine that one continuous tale was told and some might argue that such a thing did happen. We began with a bright-eyed Twilight Sparkle new to friendship, faced several challenges along the way, and ended with her as ruler of Equestria on the merits of her friendship. While Twilight Sparkle was the main character, too many other stories were told along the way to really ignore. It would be more accurate to say that the real central "character" of the series was Equestria itself. The slice of life episodes populating the series served to introduce us to this place and its residents. The allure of this magical land was great enough to overcome the simplicity of many episodes. Many of the stories on this site don't try to be great stories in and of themselves but are "better" for being in Equestria. The most blatant about this are, of course, the self-insert "I go to Equestria" types of stories, as well as many that try to obfuscate that.
A useful concept related to the setting as a character is "lore." Lore encompasses history, geography, and everything that makes the setting tick. The problem is that the lore is huge. It's far too big to detail. There are folks that try to learn all of Earth's lore and spend their whole lives on just a narrow, specialized piece. No surprise we have a lot missing for Equestria's lore even after 9 seasons, a spinoff, a movie, and the tireless efforts of the fandom. Again, it is easier to point to large things that are "missing" from canon in that we never got any explicit depiction of them or a satisfying answer. That said, FiM did a great job of teasing enough lore to entice us and convince us that the missing parts are there, under the surface. We're left to imagine the details ourselves for so much.
Between the large cast of characters, a variety of stories told, and the lore it is no wonder that it is so difficult to pin down what it was that we watched. This blog serves as an introduction to another series of blogs I have planned that will try to at least explore my own thoughts on the matter. I'll try to cover a particular topic in-depth with each blog.
What do you think of Discord after what happened in the finale?
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If you're asking what factual sequence of events I think happened, I have a blog planned for him in this series. The epilogue made it clear that in the future things were amicable though so I doubt there was much.
If you're asking my opinion, it made me dislike Discord's character quite a bit. I could empathize with his arc of basically being an asshole struggling to be less of one. But their decision to make Twilight as anxious as she was threw her character under a bus and having him resort to treason to overcome her anxiety was incredibly poor writing.
In contrast, Starlight used her dark past and recovery experience to relate to others' problems and guide them towards happier lives. Discord continued to be manipulative towards Twilight. Despite the hint that his activities were giving Cozy, Chrysalis, and Tirek an introduction to friendship, it was revealed that Discord never had any such intentions. He wasn't trying to befriend them or make them better. He was using them. That goes against the general message of the series.
They missed a big opportunity. That would be fine if what they went with hadn't been so obnoxious. It would be like buying a Lotto ticket, getting the winning number, but then using your ticket as toilet paper because you plan to use up all the actual toilet paper in the house to TP your best friend's house so they get grounded for a week.
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Also, no Grogar. Would it be more fitting if the final boss of the entire show would have been Grogar.