Bother · 3:36am Jul 5th, 2021
So I wrote this as a comment on MrNumbers's recent and quite good blogpost, before I remembered I'd been blocked. So in lieu of it going to waste, I'm dumping it in a blogpost no one will read.
I disagree with one of the premises of the article. Friendship Is Magic shies away from a lot of affirmative political statements, but it does have a project. And that project's limitations on its own terms deserve some critique as well as does the show for substituting so much else substantive with aesthetic. Friendship Is Magic is self-consciously bourgeois-liberal and bourgeois-feminist. You allude to the latter a bit when talking about how Rarity being a social climber is presented as a good thing, but (and any number of fandom fixtures have commented on this and you've been around for long enough to have , so I'm not going to bother to source it) this presentation gains much of its power from Rarity's femininity and the context surrounding the female nouveau riche - that she is an empowering counterexample to the same career path portrayed villainously. You also touch on the limitations of the show's presentation of diversity-as-virtue with respect to how the three tribes far from integrating unproblematically form a rigid (and very Indo-European) social hierarchy,* how settler colonialism was not a both-sides issue, and so forth. But the show became very frank about teaching virtue, and the unproblematic goodness of teaching virtue (its own secondary goal, behind shilling for product) as it went on. To the point where it endorsed cultural imperialism.
* I'm going to quibble a bit with your analysis of what the show has to say about modern unicorns as an aristocratic caste, because it disrupted the Indo-European model in a fairly significant way. The monarchy is presented as a social good not just because the monarch is the chiefest military leader and protector of the realm (though it is also that), but also because it frees the unicorns from (by taking up itself) what are basically priestly duties so that they can benefit the nation in other ways. It's why the monarchy sets aside resources to train "gifted" unicorns. That so many live wasteful or frivolous lives instead is not divinely ordained, it's a perversion. This is nicely highlighted by the way our main character tries to live a life of service.
This system still isn't my social ideal by any means (guess what is!), but "the rich are supposed to serve society" is a somewhat different implicit message than "society ought to have rich people for no real reason at all."
Why where you blocked?