The Ideology of My Little Pony · 1:20am Jul 5th, 2021
Lord forgive me, but I got paid to put this opinion to paper, and daddy needs the money.
This is not about making you change your pre-existing ideas of the show. We're not 'cancelling' it. It was a very good show, especially for the age of the kids it was made for and especially for the time period it was made in. It pulled me out of a dark spiral in my teenage years and put me on a path to become a much better, happier person, and for a long time I considered this community a real home. Nothing I say here is trying to take that away from anyone, least of all myself.
It was a show written by people, though, people of their time and of their social context. That affected the work, and I want to show that to learn from it and to help make future work better.
To keep things simple, I’m going to be addressing the show mostly based on its first two seasons, because I think that’s the most thematically coherent chunk to take from it, it’s when most of the work was established, and it just makes writing this way easier.
First, as always, I’m going to explain my terms. When I say ideology, I mean the collection of ideas and beliefs you have. It is not just your politics, but the process that you use to arrive at your politics. It’s the sum of your biases and experiences and your thinking.
I’m going to switch between ‘political’ and ‘ideological’ a lot. I’m going to try to use ‘ideological’ when I refer to ideas that aren’t challenged, and ‘political’ to represent ideas that are challenged in the work, or might otherwise draw challenge from the audience. Politics are the conclusions, whereas ideology is how you frame the question.
Alright. So here’s the thing about ideology: There is active and passive ideological content in your work. Active ideology is way easier to point to, because it’s deliberate messages, themes and statements that reflect your beliefs and position the audience to share them. And sometimes, the decision to try to not make any of those in your work is the statement.
Trying to keep heavy ideas out of your show for five-to-ten year olds, for instance, because you don’t think it’s appropriate to confront kids with them.
For the most part, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic tried to do this; it did its best to strip ‘political’ subjects of substance, reduce heavy ideas down to their appearances and visual themes. While the show approaches political themes a lot, it does its best to make that presentation devoid of active ideological messaging, sticking to ideas like ‘sharing is good’ and ‘try to talk things out’ and ‘John De Lancie is a menace to society’.
An example of what I mean would be Twilight becomes a princess and a ruler of Equestria. This is just so we have an interesting framework to tell stories about personal leadership skills, and trying really hard not to disappoint people. There’s no discussion of her legitimate heirs, and to my knowledge, she never has to draft any laws or civic policy. Which, you know. Good?
The problem is that there is also passive ideological content. There are the themes and statements in your work that get into your work because you don’t think about thinking about them. A misogynistic writer might not write women badly intentionally, but reveals themselves when they can’t write women sympathetically, or largely define their female characters by their relationships to male characters, who the writer is more interested in.
The writer is probably not doing that on purpose, because nobody writes badly on purpose, but that passive mindset is still influencing their work regardless of their intent.
When you decide to make a work stripped of active ideological content, then what exists in a work is almost entirely going to be that passive ideological content. It is going to be a collection of ideas that you don’t believe are ideological or political, and here’s where things get real messy.
What you define as non-political, as non-ideological, is in and of itself ideological and political.
I routinely write queer characters without thinking twice about it. I don’t even pause to consider that ideological. Someone who does not share my values will experience the work very differently, though, and put more significance on something I didn’t think twice about. Or, as this tweet summarizes it better than I could:
This is where we get to the problem with My Little Pony
My Little Pony is deeply political but, because it goes so far out of its way to be apolitical and not address this fact, it presents its political ideas as natural, unobjectionable, and inevitable. Not just the way things should be, but the only way they could be.
This is a very different work and approach to something like Aragon’s Attack on Titan series, which is about problematic intentional messaging and themes, the kind where you can find statements from the editor explicitly admitting the work endorses genocide. That’s not the problem at all here, and I’m going to try and be clear at addressing what I understand the real authorial intent behind these decisions, or lack of decisions, are.
This is about the harmful messaging that comes from the decision to try to avoid any deliberate messaging at all, and to not think too deeply about what you’re portraying. At no point am I accusing the show or its creators of intending these messages.
But this show is a slice of life show for children, young children, and the show is probably going to be the first time they’re introduced to a broad view of an adult world. It’s important to address these ideas in that context.
This can get pretty bad when there’s explicit issues of racism, classism, and monarchy present in the show, and the worst offender is probably the episode “Over a Barrel”. It’s a good place to start.
1: Over a Barrel, Whitewashing Cowboys and Indians
Before I can talk about the general themes, I think it’s useful to start with a very specific and unambiguous example. Credit where it’s due, Lauran Faust did work with a Native consultant on this episode. I think the issues were deeper than a consultant could fix, but I also know that careful and sincere thought was put into this episode.
Over a Barrel, Season 1 episode 21, is a fun episode. The main six take a train to the frontier so they can deliver an apple tree to the settler-colony town of Appleoosa! The line-level writing in this episode is top-notch. We have Fluttershy’s “I would like to be a tree” at the start of this one.
There’s another decision early on that the show wisely doesn’t call back to. Salt licks as a substitute for alcohol is a very cute visual gag, and another example of a heavier theme reduced to visuals and made safe for kids. Still, Equestria has substance abuse, that’s cool.
The framework is cowboys and indians. This is a pretty bad genre, honestly, and white supremacist propaganda. There’s the overt racism of it, like John Wayne said in 1953; “There’s humans and then there’s Comanche”. Over a Barrel removed that much. But the genre also flips real history on its head by portraying the settlers as defending themselves against the attacking non-white horde. It flips victim and victimizer. The episode pays lip service against this idea, but it still portrays the conflict in this context.
The buffalo - the Native Americans of the episode - rob the pony’s train and are trying to get rid of the ponies on their land. The ponies say this is their land, they’ve been here all of a year now, and it isn’t fair to get them to move. Portraying settling on indigineous land as an honest mistake is how the show allows the settlers a defensive role.
The confrontation initially ends violently. While we’ve been given both sides' perspectives on the conflict, and they are given equal weight, when the time comes for violence the ponies are visually distinct and given charming visuals. The buffalo, though, are a monolithic blob. They aren’t nearly as visually distinct, except for the chief and Little Strongheart.
While the narrative has been trying to get us to identify with both groups equally, the visuals themselves make it impossible to. You are drawn to identify more strongly with the settler colonists, who are portrayed as the wily and clever defenders, than you are with the indistinct horde of buffalo, who are the aggressors who just kind of headbutt everything.
Even though the episode ultimately has a positive message, representing non-white cultures as a savage horde sucks.
The episode glosses over the fact that the settlers are there pretty recently, while the buffalo have been using this land for generations. This is necessary to downplay the act of settling itself as aggression, which is what it was in the real world events that provoked the ongoing genocide of the Native American population.
Like, let’s be clear here. These are not just things that happened in the past. This is still an ongoing issue affecting living people, right now. Native Americans are 1200% as likely as white Americans to have their ballots spoiled, that is, their vote simply not counted. Federal Indian Termination Policies ran until the 1970s, at which time they were replaced with COINTELPRO. The national guard is permitted to use lethal force against land use protests on Native land.
This is pretty clear cut the best example I can use to show why depoliticizing these issues and trying to keep the aesthetics can be extremely harmful.
The episode’s narrative took these ideas and made the two groups relatively equal, and made it so that both groups needed to come to a non-violent solution that was in both of their best interests. In a sense, this is the show trying to portray a world that resolves its problems the way we wish our world did. That’s noble! That’s a good way to establish Equestria as more utopian.
But these are the first time a child will probably see these ideas. What they will see is that the history of settler colonialism was scary and both sides threatened to fight, but it could be sorted out if everyone came together and agreed to be nice and share.
This is a similar idea, I think, that the American story of Thanksgiving tries to get across as well. As long as all children’s media shares the same motivation to keep these realities away from children, it means a child is likely to think if the Native Americans got wiped out in the real world, it was at least half their own fault. They’re given no counterexamples to work from.
This misunderstanding is what they will take to learning the real history when they’re introduced to it. And that’s really damaging. I will absolutely agree with you that children do not need to be introduced to the realities of genocide and colonialism! This episode would not be made better by being honest in its portrayal. It is misinforming children, though, by presenting the Natives as equivalent and as aggressors.
It’s part of a pattern where the show wants to keep the imagery from these real events, remove the real world connotations of them, and assume that’s made the ideas safe. But really, it’s presenting some really harmful ideas and teaching kids that they are safe ones.
Even though kids are smart enough to know they’re watching a cartoon, when they see parallels to the real world within the cartoon, they assume the real events are simplified, not misrepresented, because they understand they’re meant to learn lessons from these stories.
It’s like if I give a child a completely blunted knife as a toy so they could play-pretend being a chef, but at no point did I teach them other knives are sharp. Children are smart enough to understand fiction and play, but they’re trying to learn true things through them. Kids know on their own they’re not real chefs, but they need to be shown how it’s not a real knife.
The other examples I’m going to give are less clear-cut than “Over a Barrel”, broad themes and patterns, but I hope this makes it clear why making these ideas safe and ‘apolitical’ causes harm when children take these ideas into the world with them.
2: Unicorn supremacy, and the problem with dirt ponies
A long time ago there were the three tribes, who realized they needed to work together in harmony, and by doing so, founded Equestria.
The unicorns were the regal rulers, the pegasi were the gallant warriors, and the earth ponies grew all the food. The unicorns and pegasus taxed the earth ponies to survive, the pegasus because they controlled the weather and the unicorns because they raised and lowered the sun.
When the show revealed this lore, it produced some staggeringly political statements about Equestria that it didn’t seem to think of as political: Aristocracy is a fact of life, the unicorns were ‘tribally’ assigned to it, and working together in harmony was a decision all three parties - including the earth ponies - needed to come to equally.
From here on out I’m going to be using ‘tribes’ and ‘race’ interchangeably, even though there are differences in presentation and they’re not directly analogous. There are enough overlaps, especially in the fact that we are talking about genetically heritable traits.
There are more explicit racially coded parts of the show, though, something I’ve already covered in Over a Barrel. I’ll cover Zecora in section 4 too, don’t worry.
I also want to save going over the assumptions of a class structure for the next part. I can’t totally do that, though, because these two points overlap. Much like real life, the issues of class and ‘race’ are deeply intermixed in Equestria. For now, it’s enough to say that there are obviously class divides, and I want to go in on the fact they’re initially racialized.
Because while there is a class divide, the most significant issue starts with the immense power and value imbalance between the three ‘tribes’. The pegasus control the weather, the unicorns have all the magic and wealth, and the earth ponies grow the food.
This would probably make earth ponies more important if there were anything special about them that made them talented at farming. But the series makes it pretty clear that, ah, this isn’t the case. By this point of the show, Twilight has trivially done a full day of Applejack’s work using her magic. While it’s popular fanon to give earth ponies a bit more oomph to what they can do, canon ducks this completely.
No, it seems like the earth ponies are in charge of growing the food largely because they’re the ones that get bullied into peasantry, not because of a unique aptitude. Everyone can farm, but only the earth ponies are assigned to farming as a group. They're defined by what they can't do instead.
What this essentially means is that the show explicitly has a racial allegory with unicorns, pegasus and earth ponies, and then makes two of those races absolutely superior to one. Unicorns specifically have innate biological superiority, in the form of magic, but also for a long time in the early show they are characterized to be the aristocracy, meaning they are the dominant class and social category.
Which is to say, there is no Celestia’s School for Gifted Earth Ponies.
Obviously this is an aesthetic choice. It makes sense to group things in patterns, and unicorns are the symbol of real-world noble heraldry that places like Canterlot imitates. It is obvious that this is not deliberate and intentional messaging, it’s an aesthetic choice.
It’s just, you know. Making wealth and classism an aesthetic choice because it imitates the real world also has some really gross connotations.
See, on the other side of this, you have Applejack, and what I mean when I say that peasantry has been racialized.
The only times Applejack is portrayed as relatively wealthy is when she is contrasted with other farmers, notably Pinkie Pie’s family. She is still consistently portrayed as poor compared to non-farmers.
Of the main six, Applejack is the only character who has storylines that hinge on the need to make money, and to manage financial crisis, to the extent she is the only character consistently worried about losing her home and her livelihood. She wants to go to the Grand Galloping Gala in the first season to afford surgery for her grandmother.
While this is usually a compelling and immediately understandable set of stakes, and it’s good storytelling material, it’s significant that it only ever applies to her, the farmer, because it is assumed that farmers are poor or financially struggling, even in an otherwise utopian setting.
This is an assumption of farmers taken from the real world and applied to a setting that lacks the same justifications for things being that way. It means it’s treated as a truth about farmers, without making any value statements on whether this is good or bad.
This is already a problem. It means even in the utopian world of Equestria, it’s assumed that some people are poor. But when you combine that with the fact that farming is the entire tribal motif of earth ponies, then you’re essentially codifying racialized intergenerational poverty into your story.
Which is a political statement that could only have been made unintentionally, by deliberately choosing to avoid any political statements, and drawing uncritically from real world examples.
Saying farmers shouldn’t be poor, or that no one should be poor, would be an active, controversial political statement. Portraying farmers as poor, even in a utopian society like Equestria, is just treated as a neutral fact. And it’s training kids to assume that fact.
And the worst part is, I understand a deeper reasoning for doing it. There are farm kids in the audience of this show, and this is representation for them. It just kind of sucks that it’s easier to imagine a world where talking ponies fight dragons, control the weather and raise the sun, than it is to imagine a world where farmers don’t have to worry about money.
3: You’ve either got or you haven’t got class
Okay, so what do I mean by class here? I mean different sections of society with distinct cultural presentations based on wealth. In Equestria we can’t really see the mechanisms of land and business ownership. That would be active ideological messaging and the show does its best to remove it, except where there’s a compelling narrative reason. Losing a deed to a farm presumes the existence of property deeds, etc.
It’s pretty obvious that there is a high society and a low society, made obvious in that Rarity has a long character arc where it takes serious work to integrate into high society, a conflict spanning seasons.
What’s important here is that it means that the show, in wanting to show this conflict, necessarily has to bring a class structure to the setting. Like, they want Rarity to have something to struggle for, and high society lords and ladies are a very nice visual, especially when you want the swooping palaces and architecture of Canterlot. Again, it’s all very fairytale.
What this basically means is the show is trying to say, look, yeah, there’s a class divide, but it’s not political. It doesn’t mean anything deeper than that. Don’t overthink this. It’s only here for the look of the thing.
But, you know. No.
This is training kids to know that there’s an upper class that they’re alienated from, and that it’s desirable to be in it - just as long as you don’t forget about your friends along the way.
To the show’s credit, they show this by Rarity adopting class signifiers and through hard work, not through getting rich. It’s just, she also gets rich doing this. Just, as a side effect.
In the real world, it’s understood to be a holdover from extremely undemocratic models of society that our current world is growing out of. In Equestria, we have an immortal, eternal, ‘perfect’ philosopher-king in Celestia, guiding this society with her benevolent rule, and she apparently went; You know what? There should be rich people. Resources should be distributed unequally enough that you have an aristocracy.
There’s a reason Celestia’s like that, she’s meant to feel to an adult character how a mum feels to a child. I’ll get to that. But for now, it’s enough to say that because of that, Equestria is framed as an ideal and utopian society, led by Celestia as a mother raises a child. This implies that a utopia doesn’t exist in spite of an aristocracy, but needs one.
And questioning that - questioning whether that is a good thing for society - would be an active ideological statement. That’s out the window, you can’t put that in your kid’s show. Aristocracies really exist, and have existed, so simply portraying them is non-ideological. It is only made ‘political’ by questioning it. If you don’t ask that question, there is no conflict.
The show is sometimes critical of aristocrats, largely being snooty and uptight, but this isn’t the same thing. Especially when it makes an effort to have characters like Fancy Pants be unambiguously treated as examples of good aristocrats. Again, Rarity is never shown to be wrong for wanting to become one, and becomes a sympathetic example herself.
There is a criticism of the individuals within the class, but it doesn’t imply at any point the class as a whole should not exist, and it doesn’t give any ideas on what Equestria could look like without a class structure. The show doesn’t say whether it’s good or bad that an aristocracy exists, but it does push the idea that one has to for society to exist at all.
You can’t uncritically take all the aesthetics of fairytales without being uncritical of the feudalism you take with those aesthetics, it’s the same problem we saw with the cowboys-and-indians.
Speaking of Celestia, though.
4. Hobbes’ Leviathan is a Pretty Pony Princess.
So, Celestia’s an immortal unquestioned monarch who literally controls the rising and setting of the sun. This puts her more analogous to a Pharaoh than a Princess, but whatever.
In the original show, Zecora was meant to be more of Twilight’s leadership and mentor figure, and Celestia was to be a more distant part. I’d have liked that a lot actually, because I think Zecora would have been a much more interesting character for that. Her authority is entirely unofficial, but you go to her for leadership because she’s wise and cool.
Instead, it’s got to be Celestia. She sells more toys.
This is the first time I’ve touched on it, but My Little Pony was not just the work of its writers and creative leads. It was also, critically, a commercial product to sell toys. It’s unclear whether you would be allowed to solve many of the problems I’ve pointed to and still clear a Hasbro producer.
I said it right at the start, though. The show was written by people of their time and social context, and one very important piece of social context is that they were staff writers for a toy-selling corporation.
I saved this for the portion on Celestia because the Princesses are, to my knowledge, the most explicit case of executive meddling affecting the show’s ideological messaging. Part and parcel with this is the executive decision that Cadance had to be an alicorn, not a pegasus, cementing the ubermensch royalty.
Why’s the change from Zecora to Celestia such a big deal?
It’s hard not to be glib about this: It’s because Celestia starts off as an immortal perfect ruler who’s also your mum, and that’s how she was meant to be.
Again, kid’s show. You want to give an adult character a relationship that feels like a child’s relationship to a parent, that’s what you do, it sells that idea excellently, especially in the early seasons.
It’s just. There’s trying to have your cake and eat it, here.
Every time Celestia is in the foreground, her presence and significance is diminished. Especially when she and Luna getting their butts kicked is the way to signpost how dangerous a villain is. After enough time in focus, Celestia loses the sense of mystery and ambiguity that made her special, and is just reduced to being Equestria’s Mum. Flawed, fallible, comprehensible.
Very endearing, great to write fanfiction about, big collateral damage to the show as a whole.
I am going to try not to be mad about the Season 2 finale now, and I am going to fail at it.
“A Canterlot Wedding” came out nine years ago and I am still mad about it. I still hate how they had Celestia treat Twilight. I know it would have undercut the plot for Celestia to have believed Twilight about Cadance/Chrysalis, but it would have been so much more elegant for Celestia to have simply been offscreen looking for changelings until the final conflict with Chrysalis, like they did with Luna. It worked how they did it with Luna.
By having Celestia not trust Twilight, by having Celestia be wrong about something so important, It made her so much more fallible and diminished - necessary if Celestia has to be a character, not simply the force of nature she was intended to be. It also legitimized Twilight’s fears of disappointing Celestia, it recontextualized her anxieties as a sincere possibility between the two of them rather than an irrational fear of Twilight’s.
This shreds the sense that Equestria is such a perfect society because of anything special about her capacity as a leader. We are eventually given episodes that show what a Princess actually does and it’s underwhelmingly very British-royals. Probably a deliberate allusion.
The end result of this is that the show ends up saying the reason Equestria is so perfectly run isn’t because of Celestia’s exceptionalism, but because it’s a monarchy. It runs because her competent, well-meaning, but ultimately unspecial decisions are made unilaterally.
The show gives us a counterexample, an elected official in Mayor Mare, but uh, she only does ceremonial functions and gives Twilight Sparkle everything important to deal with. Again, a narrative decision that makes sense, but not a positive statement about the efficacy of democracy. The most sensible action the democratic leader takes is to give all authority to a protagonist at the first opportunity. Awesome.
I want to stress that Celestia was meant to be kept distant and mysterious for a reason. The problems with trying to treat Celestia as a character in this way were known from the start. This is not a problem of authorial intent, but the idea that children would not be excited enough to buy Zecora toys. This is also the reason Zecora does not even get a canonical backstory.
There’s nothing really wrong with the idea of Celestia herself, the core concept. Having her be this distant, perfect figure is excellent fairytale-fantasy and it lets you handwave away actually discussing how the nation of Equestria functions. The problem is that by making her play a role she should not have, by bringing her too close to the camera, the fantastical nature of her completely unravels. Without the fairytale smokescreen, you’re just left with an argument for authoritarianism.
I’m not reaching with that, either, it’s obvious that a lot of people picked up on that idea, because the early fandom, especially the artists, took it to creative places.
A ton of the early fandom’s non-pornographic fanart of the Sisters was explicitly emulating authoritarian propaganda for a reason, and stuff like the New Lunar Republic was really big back then. Artists and musicians picked up the subtext here and ran with it to some really stylish places. Much like the show itself, most of it was trying to keep politically significant visuals and divorcing them from their real political substance.
I think it was a lot more common back then because artists felt more confident nobody was taking that too seriously. Stuff like Aryanne made it harder to play in that space. Enough of the fanbase tried to reapply the real politics and context to this imagery and portray it sincerely. Even if it’s not a majority, it made it too easy to be mistaken as supporting that increasingly vocal minority.
Side note, how cool is it that someone took the effort to make animated fanart of Aryanne using a washing machine to gas me to death that one time? Kind of wish I could find it again, but on the other hand I’m glad I can’t. Maybe it wasn’t made for me, it was just one of the ones I was sent and told it was about me? Because that also happened. Hard to remember.
Sorry, I’m bitter.
It’s fine, time I wrapped this section up. The show probably had to push monarchy in a way it didn’t want to, because Twilight learning from an African teacher wouldn’t sell enough toys. That’s ideology.
5. Today, I learned...
I got distracted there, but I want to emphasize that I don’t think any of these ideas are what attracted the Aryanne audience. Again, nobody’s ‘cancelling’ the literally cancelled show.
What I more wanted to cover is that you need to think about what you say in your stories even when you don’t mean to say anything with them. It is flat out not possible to tell most stories without the storyteller’s ideas on culture, their biases, their prejudices and their selves being tied into the work.
Or, you know, without incorporating their boss’s ideas.
I agree with a lot of the reasons behind why Friendship is Magic presented a lot of its ideas in the way it did. Episode to episode, it’s often what made the most storytelling sense. I don’t think it would have been a better children’s show if it did actually try to overtly address class and racial inequalities.
But in trying to say nothing about these issues, the show often implied that there was nothing to say about these issues, or implied that they weren’t issues at all.
By presenting a utopia like Equestria as too significantly different to the real world, it would be making a statement about what should be changed in our world, and it’s understandable why the creators wouldn’t want to do that.
But by copying the ideas from our world without criticizing them, it portrays these things as so innate to how the world works that even our idea of utopia would have to include them in some way. It could not present a world without poor farmers and rich nobles. That’s still an ideological message, and it’s worth being critical of it.
Even if you don’t agree with that, then at least take from this that Earth ponies deserved better than what they got, and so did Zecora.
Tl;dr illiterate violent radical yells at clouds got it
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Okay so beyond saying 'tl;dr' and then calling me illiterate being extremely funny, is doing this actually the reason you follow me, or what?
It's also worth mentioning that trying to sell Zecora toys would be deeply problematic because of how stereotypical they made her. I'm talking about her design this time, but there's still the fact that the African equine is a witchdoctor who speaks entirely in rap and explicitly creeps all the other characters out.
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Maybe they're just really tsundere?
Some children's shows are better about this than others. In a sense, as you've made apparent here, MLP:G4 is essentially just our current society with a coating of fantasy paint thrown over it. Other shows, such as The Owl House, actively criticize certain elements. Like, one of the villains in that series is a literal capitalist pig. Yet, the same base is used there, too. The Boiling Isles still has a monarchy and an upper class. Heck, Korra had both fascists and anarchists as villains for different seasons. People should be more willing to reshape the roots of the fictional worlds they build.
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I felt brain cells dying by the second paragraph so I skipped to the bottom. But I did see yet more "white heteronormative cismale smugs about badly writing queer poc characters" as usual so good job there. I also want a front row seat for when you finally have an aneurysm.
Too much politics would have made the show a$$ though. Look at what its done to the fandom the past two years or so. A little escapism isn’t always a bad thing. And for Zecora, she got a racism is bad ep as her debut. Was it the best they could have handled it? Probably not but I don’t think it needed to be perfect.
owO?
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Jesus Christ you're a tedious asshole. At least read something if you're gonna criticize it, so you can do so on the content itself and not your snide preconceived notions about the author. Trust me, you'll look marginally smarter.
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My take on this is that honestly while I acknowledge the problems, and there's a reason the show stopped using other species as cultural stand-ins in general (the yaks represent yaks, griffons are griffons, etc.), Zecora's an extremely cool character and her cultural presentation rules. If you just get scared of presenting other cultures entirely, they don't get represented, and you make an argument for inclusivity conditional on integration.
My preferred solution would have been to have shown more zebras in the show in general, and to have had more non-white voice actors. But yeah, this one's more complicated than I really wanted to get into.
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... You are wishing for their death for...
Having mild criticisms?
Well written, and thank you for voicing some of my issues with the series (definitely not enough Zecora), and how the show kind of, without putting too fine a point on it, upheld the general narrative of colonial white supremacy the first few seasons because that's what happens when we comment on so called "apolitical" ideology and mark it as "default."
I say that as someone who loves much of the first couple of seasons, but yeah, these were some of the things that irked me a bit, too. I was especially frustrated at the notion that there are poor ponies in the magical land of Equestria. Like you, though, I figured since Hasbro was trying to sell toys, there's no way in Tartarus they'd ever suggest any other economic system being remotely plausible in our magical land of dragons and gryphons.
This was a really interesting retrospective. Sure the show has problems which are thoughtfully pointed out here but we can all agree that the show came around at a time when a lot of us really needed it and has brought together some really amazing writers and artists.
I think its important to acknoweldge when a show intended for young children has issues, I'm sure a lot of people can relate to your feelings towards the political and ideological problems the show presents. At the same time, the show was made to sell toys, which I personally see as a greedy capitalist problem all on its own. I wish more shows got made out of passion rather than just the need to make money and fund CEO's super yachts.
All that aside, I really enjoyed reading this and I'm glad you're getting paid for your hard work
Funny that you wrote this as this is something that I have always thought about and at one point even really considered writing a story about. IN particular the part about Earth Ponies being treated as lesser even if it is in a way that makes you know that the the characters in the story do not think or realize it. I was always bothered how the show makes no seeming effort to show how earth ponies are special like how the other ponies types are special. I also dislike how it is clear how alicorns take cues from the pegasus and the unicorn but what do they get from the earth ponies?
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The only thing they conclusively have is "strength", though often times this seems limited to a few exceptional individuals (Big Mac, Maud, etc). There's also the Pie family that farms rocks but this is never explained how or why. Meanwhile, every pegasus can fly (except Scootaloo), and manipulate clouds, if badly, and every unicorn has TK. Much later in the show they may have implied being able to speed up the growth of plants, but outside of a few songs this is never really touched upon either.
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Having read your lengthy blogpost complaining about the flurry of inane, childish, and deconstructive comments you were getting on one of your stories, I find this particular reply of yours somewhat ironic.
magnificent! once again you have taken all of my underlying uneases and perfectly given form to them, thank you!
Yeah, the canon show is rife with issues. I personally came across the show fairly recently so my views don't quite have the same oomph I guess you could call it. There are a couple of ideas mentioned in your...(paper?) That I don't exactly agree with but I am not so egotistical as to believe that it may be my own biases and foibles.
When arguing about the relative unimportance of Earth Ponies compared to Unicorns and Pegasi, I agree that the show left things pretty lacking. Where I disagree is with your pointing to Twilight as an example and Twilight is not exactly a common unicorn even before her alicornification. Most unicorns in canon are pretty well...normal for a certain definition of the word.
There is no real purpose to the jobs the Earth ponies do. Their jobs are useless garbage given to them by the ruling class. Unicorns can do their jobs many times more efficiently. If I'm not wrong, in one episode Twilight helps Applejack by harvesting all of her orchards in like 5 seconds. Its just bullshit jobs made for the earth ponies to feel like they're accomplishing something.
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While true, even just having ok TK let's you utilize tools or weapons with skill far beyond the motor control of one stuck with hooves. Its somewhat lampshaded in Number's fic Historical Accuracy, in how TK lets you use crossbows much more easily. Or if we want to exclude crossbows since they don't seem to be used much, you can still throw stuff a lot more easily and accurately with TK. (Hooves makes coming up with tools designed for them extremely difficult)
And if we look at the extreme ends of all three, Unicorns at their peak can learn to warp reality, Pegasi can exceed the sound barrier and summon tornadoes, Earth ponies can ... punch really, really hard?
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For your point about using Twilight as an example, I'd also point out that Applejack is treated as to earth ponies what Twilight is to unicorns (as Rainbow Dash is to pegasus), and still gets outperformed in her specific niche. I totally agree that Twilight's an exaggerated example of what a unicorn can do, but it's still true that there's no counterexample of an earth pony doing something a unicorn couldn't do because of being an earth pony.
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Which is why I also disagree with this. Even if unicorns could replace all earth pony labour, people still work to feel useful and socially necessary, not just because they're made to. Most ponies seem to work for themselves and love the work that they do. It's one of the ways Equestria seems sincerely utopian.
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I have to question why a unicorn can't enjoy farming? We have to assume none actually do, because if they did, they would easily crush Applejacks farm (which barely makes a profit) and other Earth pony farms out of business extremely quickly. A unicorn could harvest with a significantly lower investment of labor, and therefore be able to sell those apples at a discount far beyond what any earth-pony could hope to achieve. God help the earth ponies if this happened, they'd be run out of business extremely quickly. However, for some reason or another, unicorns never farm. I guess its a cultural thing that culturally farming is below them and that this sort of stratification is good for their nation.
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There were the Flim Flams. Though they seemed to have terrible business sense.
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Maybe earth ponies just like farming and unicorns just normally don’t. Earth ponies have some special connection to earth or something so maybe they just are drawn to it more.
lmao don't even get me started about Zecora the Magic Negress. I've been going off on the whole "Otherized African Horse" thing for a decade. Like why is Ponyville a Sundown Town and why is Zecora apparently The Last Black Man in Equestria. You're goddamn right Hasbro was scared to do more with Zebras in the show lol. They're fortunate that black bronys were willing to ironically adopt zebras and use the ahem casually racist worldbuilding as a literary device to deconstruct....things. (YES THAT INCLUDES PORN
)
Oh gods, don't get me going on Over a Barrel! I loathed the episode, and I nearly stopped watching the show because of it. At least the staff realized how badly they had blundered and, aside from some incidentals, we never saw the buffalo again. The attempt to make Little Braveheart look "cute" was... horrific. Thankfully, we got Yona later on to take the bad taste of that out of my mouth.
The rest of the article... I'm going to read it over again tomorrow and think about it. I'm not sure my concerns match up to yours in exactly the same way or proportion, but I'm interested in thinking about how to construct a classic fantasy that both addresses (or dodges) these problems and is a fun and satisfying story.
I will say that I'm a bit surprised that you didn't mention the scene of Fluttershy trying to buy the last cherries at the market for Angel's salad. Opinion on that scene was nearly unanimous in condemning the actions of the merchant who kept jacking up the price, when it was a perfect example of the "law" of Supply and Demand, a fundamental principal for Capitalist marketplaces. Really, the scene could have the take-away of "Capitalism sucks for the desperate," and... is that the sort of addressing of problems you'd be happy with?
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It's a shame really, because Earth Ponies could have been given a lot of powers related to Earth as an alchemical element. Blacksmiths, metallurgists, chemists, carpenters... -ish, or maybe foresters (who got the library tree to grow that way?), rock-farming for growing perfect magical crystals, super-abundant crop yields and discouragement of pests, even a communion with earth spirits like the one that showed up in a later episode. And those are just off the top of my head.
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I think this is where the fandom really latched onto the idea of Earth ponies having a special connection to the Earth itself and usually giving them a level of prowess with growing things, though the show itself never really explored this, despite its prevalence in fan works. It does give Earth ponies a special reason to be farmers if they have that connection/aptitude that other tribes don't. To use the example of Twilight (and therefore any unicorn) being able to do the harvesting work much more easily/cheaply. It wouldn't outshine an Earth Pony that a unicorn could do this if they never had the ability to grow an exceptional crop beyond what an Earth pony could in the first place.
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pbs.twimg.com/media/ETA85_aXsAAM21X.jpg
I hope to see more work on this topic from you soon, particularly your take on Seasons 8 and 9 (if any). This is well done so far ^^
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This is kind of what I meant where I'd have preferred they did more. Just one of her's a trope, but building a broader context around her and including more overtly non-white ponies so that zebra didn't mean black, and black didn't mean zebra, could have presented inclusivity as unconditional on integration. I'm also a fan of her as a feminist archetypal character rather than as a racial one, though I get the two are inseparable here. I'm not sure broader representation would help with that one.
I'm also writing from an Australian context, based on what I understand of First Nations representation, where the two dominant representations are either fully assimilated ('one of the good ones'), or as wildlife. In that respect, the fact that Zecora that doesn't move in to Ponyville and is otherized but still welcomed and given a protagonist role can be positive for how racism is expressed here.
But, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The fact that it contextualizes Ponyville as a sundown town is a really good and gross point. And I'll take that movie recommendation too. Everything I learn about San Francisco kills my soul a little bit.
I know you said 'don't get me started', but at the end of the day, I am a white Australian writer who is doing his best, and I understand that often will not be good enough. If this doesn't sound right to you, I'd genuinely love to hear why, and I'll try to carry it forward. My PMs are open if you'd prefer that.
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It's because it's a Fluttershy scene, and I skipped or skimmed her episodes. I remember that, now, though.
I would say it's not really a systemic criticism though. Markets predate capitalism by millennia, and most people don't experience capitalism through haggling. Probably my biggest thought on why this scene's interesting is because if this episode had been written for an adult audience, they would almost always show this conflict by having Fluttershy not able to handle unwanted """romantic""" attention. Sex Education, on Netflix, as an example from recent memory. I'm sure someone smarter than me can draw interesting out of that observation.
This is honestly the takeaway I intended here. I think for most of these, the cure's often worse than the disease. Stuff like lampshading very easily becomes the worst kind of 'how do you do, fellow kids'. Very interested to hear what you think though, always love to hear from you.
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This, my friends, is what is known as "projection".
My biggest disappointment with FiM is they wouldn't even let the writers address Scootaloo's disability head on. The one time in the show they mentioned it they were super vague about it, so it was up to the animators to showcase her broken little wings as an adult. I really, really, really hated that. They didn't want to take the slightest risk of controversy. Even Scootaloo's aunts never did anything to confirm they were a couple. See also AppleDash. Literally the most progressive thing in the show was Lyra and Bon Bon proposing to each other hidden in the background.
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Calling Mr. Numbers illiterate makes about as much sense as insulting Barack Obama by calling him fat.
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I love some of your ideas for Earth Ponies. As to why they never gave the EP's more "oomph" in canon, I can think of several reasons:
A) They didn't think of it at the time. *
B) Corporate Meddling (profits over story)
C) Now don't be makin' the story too complex fer the kiddies now ya'hear?
*From an interview with Lauren Faust herself fairly early in the show the crew sometimes had to practically have an entire season's worth of material ready for taping by the end of the week(or something like that) it was a huge conveyor belt of a process. So going on hours long musings would be incredibly difficult in such a time-crunch situation.
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I get that DID isn't conducive to self-awareness, but also being the trans daughter of two of the most oppressed races in human history really ought to have done a better job counteracting that in this specific case.
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Just a head's up, I blocked them when they told me they were following me to be first in line when I died of an aneurysm. The horse is dead and you have my permission to stop flogging it.
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Yup, its a bit of a personal gripe for me that it is near impossible to find a fic that has anything close to a "School for gifted Earth ponies", and also a lack of protagonists who are one. Hell, I've gone to the point of making their own mythical name: Terrasire/Terrasi. Bit generic, but "Earth Borne" is better than nothing.
Also, since I swear it was implied somewhere that all ponies were magical (Tirek or Starlight have to be stealing something, right?), I decided to make it a range thing as differentiators, along with a state of matter they specialize in.
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Your comment reminded me that there was a fan story where Applebloom got an acceptance letter to attend CSGU for alchemy (or something along those lines) the story mostly focuses IIRC on her preparation for entrance exams. Other stories exist: Luna making a school, There being a school that we just never heard of (given that the show only covers maybe 5% of Equestria's geography) or that when Celestia founded her school, it wasn't out of any malice that it got that seemingly exclusionary moniker. Another popular one is that her school openly accepts other tribes, at least officially (bullies exist sadly) but given that we had during the entire run of the show a mere hoof full of active references to CSGU from Twilight who during her formative years was not the sort to go walking up to anyone (maybe aside from her professors) much less an EP student.
And tbh, given her personality, as much as I wish to deny it, she probably has subconscious biases that even being made Princess and later Queen of Equestria would not be able to entirely escape. During her younger years it's not much of a stretch to imagine her being one of those girls who take a bit too much pride in their brains. I find nerdy girls to be attractive but I draw a line between adorkable Twilight and a supercilious know-it-all who treats anyone who doesn't have 15 degrees to their name as worthless. Thankfully her experiences tempered her by burning away the metaphorical impurities of those bygone years.
That first sentence explains 90% of the show’s problems after S4. Once they added some continuity between episodes, the writers largely still focused on making the best episodes possible at the expense of the series saying anything coherent as a whole.
I think I agree with your second sentence here, but it seems to be close enough to one of my views on the show that I want to agree but may have implications that would leave me embarrassingly wrong if I outright said “I agree” or “I disagree”.
Namely, “Equestria is not Earth” was one of the primary attraction points for the show for me. However, you bring up a very good point that such a distinction may be contrary to the show’s secondary purpose as a didactic story for human children.
The two places where this conflict seems to be most highlighted are:
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TBF, the ponies being freaked out by Zecora in their initial impression is based on IRL body language miscommunication between horses and zebras. A horse pawing at the ground is a sign of imminent aggression. Zebras scratch the dirt to find water holes.
I do wish that FiM had more zebras. Are zebras a fourth race of pony or are they simply a group of ponies with distinctive coat patterns and zebracorns and flying zebras exist?
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Your argument here reminds me of my argument against those who discuss how a higher minimum wage reduces employment among low-skilled workers. At least IRL, it would be better for society if most minimum wage jobs were fully automated instead of the government playing games with the cooperation of Wal*Mart to say “see, these people are simply workers in low-paying jobs who just need a few extra bucks to make ends meet. They’re not actually on the dole.”
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Got links?
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I'll dig around my library and see what I can find. Maybe move this to PM so we don't clog things up here.
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There's a phenomenon that I don't know a name for, but it irritated me when it appeared in the Journal of the Two Sisters. It's when a writer takes something canon and expands it for lazy worldbuilding purposes (although in the case of negotiated IP, it might also be to avoid doing worldbuilding that the IP owner might veto). Examples: zecora rhymes, therefore all zebras rhyme; there was a griffon pastry chef, therefore all griffons like pastries. There's a difference between referencing something in the show and destroying character development by taking something unique and using it as a broad characterization. It's almost speciesist, but it's definitely crap writing to lean on this all the time.
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I believe an informal version is Flanderization, though that's more about specific characters.
I would argue that all of the Mane 6 and Celestia and Luna got heavily Flanderized as the show went on.
I love this blog for two reasons. First, it feels like a spiritual companion (not successor or sequel, since it's more than good enough to stand on its own as a critical piece) to Aragon's fantastic AoT review, primarily because they both address how creators are responsible for the implications of their creation. While not everything is political, everything is ideological, and ideology informs politics. Because of that, any choice to remain "apolitical" is nevertheless a political choice--namely, a choice to assume the status quo is just natural, rather than inherently good or bad.
And I think that's quietly the biggest "political" divide in America: not between left and right, per se, but between people making conscious political choices and people whose lives allow them to avoid making those choices. It's an extraordinarily hard gap to bridge, and it requires a much gentler and more empathetic approach than a lot of people who make conscious political choices want to apply. I think you did that well here, because you understand that it's not a conscious political argument at all, but rather an unconscious ideological one, and challenging anyone's core beliefs that they often don't even realize they have is a lot trickier and a lot more abrasive than just telling them their conscious choice about a political solution to something is wrong.
The other thing I love about this blog is what I think it reveals about why this show specifically generated such a massive fandom--and particularly a fan fiction--presence for seemingly no explicable reason. Sure, the world was interesting, the characters were well-formed, and there was plenty of room to explore vaguely-hinted-at background canon. And sure, New Sincerity was starting to become a thing in the early 2010s, and this syrupy-sweet but still fundamentally well-made property hit in the right place at the right time, when YouTube hadn't yet been fully annihilated by monetization efforts and episodes were easy to find and watch and discuss in unrestricted places.
But I think what really set FiM apart from other shows and cartoons, and what drove so many people to write so many millions of words about technicolor talking horses, is exactly what you analyzed in this blog: the subtle-at-first, glaring-once-you-looked-for-it incongruence between the apolitical world the show nominally existed within and the clearly ideological assumptions that informed its creation. Because Equestria was created by humans (and specifically corporate humans looking to sell toys without making waves), its implicit history was basically humans' explicit history--and yet, this world had magic and castles and monarchies and hooves, and ours didn't. And that's what really got us going, I believe: not just the characters, not just the cultural moment, but the questions that canon couldn't avoid asking of itself because it tried so hard to ask nothing at all.
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Oh, yeah. Direct-analogue representation with clumsy or forced "morals" grafted on, delivered by cardboard characters mechanically pacing out the "lesson." No fun for anybody.
But a fun fantasy (Maybe with airship pirates?) that turns over some subconscious prejudices while skewering racism and upper-class privilege no matter who practices it? Showing the evil extremes of authoritarianism and the cult of personality by providing direct examples? Inverting the unicorn-EP dynamic while throwing complex Earth Pony magic into the mix? All in the setting of a fast-paced adventure story? Yeah... that might be nice. Too bad it's never been done (successfully). *sigh*
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Oh, I don't think there was much doubt about it! Twilight was an upper-class snob at the beginning of the show. She slowly got better, even though she still had moments when that unconscious bias surfaced again. Remember that Gabby Gums article about her in the Foal Free Press? That was her backsliding into "Karen" mode.
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I think you're absolutely dead-on with this.
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And this here is one of the things I personally felt Lauren Faust and the team did a fairly good job of avoiding. Feel free to disagree, but I'm a Johnny come lately to the show (s6 or 7) but when I was going through the earlier seasons the lessons rarely felt forced, it was more of a suggestion than a "thou shalt..." sort of thing. Not going to say that it worked perfectly all the time, but compared to other shows I've watched (my brother used to watch Caillou for example) a commendable effort (7.5/10).
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Darn, that's a really good way of putting it!
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No, I agree with that. The best episodes were realistic problems with fairly reasonable resolutions, even if the stated morals (letters/journal entries) were simplistic or slightly off-target. Friendship problems (even within a pseudo-feudal hierarchy) are still a very human thing.
EDIT: BTW, have you seen Hilda? It's a lovely series that I really enjoy, and I now want to go back and re-watch it through the lens of this discussion. I think it will come off well...
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No can't say that I have. Tbh, for the past 5 years or so we've only had a TV in name, we never bothered with hooking up cable. Most of the stuff I watch is online. In fact, I'll need to get myself a Netflix subscription if I want to watch G5.