Sep
25th
2021
DANNYJ REVIEWS: MY LITTLE PONY: A NEW GENERATION · 5:53am Sep 25th, 2021
Gather and attend, for lo, do I render judgement.
Spoilers follow.
Damnit, I was so close!
6/10. It was better than the Haber seasons.
lol
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DannyJ · 518 views
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#DannyJ Reviews
#G5
#Feature-length 20K word review spectacular
#For really reals
#Hail Hydra
Okay, but seriously, if you want grumpy ol' DannyJ's real opinion, I'd say that the movie was just... okay. I guess whether you like it or not depends on what you get out of MLP. The continuity still seems terrible (unless the G5 series addresses some things, but I doubt it), but the new characters are mostly likeable, I guess. The plot is clichéd and kids' movie standard, but it serves as an adequate introduction to this world and foundation for these characters. The writing and themes have the subtlety of a bulldozer crashing through your front wall, especially the villain, but the tone is light and the world doesn't feel nearly as cynical as I was expecting given the premise. I also didn't like the music, but the new animation didn't bother me overmuch, so I'd say it balanced out as far as presentation goes.
Overall, I definitely wouldn't say that it was good, but I enjoyed it more than the 2017 movie, and I enjoyed it a lot more than the last three seasons of FiM. I know that that's a low bar to clear and that this sounds like damning by faint praise, but there you go. I could give this the full review treatment and really tear into it like I did the Haber seasons if I really wanted to, but I don't. It's just a dumb kids' movie; it's not worth taking seriously. And most people I know who watched it seemed to like it, so whatever. It's harmless, I guess. If you find something to like in it or something to inspire you, then good for you. Otherwise, we return our regularly scheduled programming.
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"Thanks, Hasbro. You took a reboot brimming with personality, inventiveness, audience respect, feminist themes, and cross-demographic appeal, and sucked all the life out of it."
Was wondering how you'd see it. I've seen the reviews going up, and honestly nothing suggests I'm missing much. Even the positive reviews generally seem superficial and/or vague. Like, "so-and-so character was fun" or "this setting has potential", that sort of thing.
Doesn't sound like the "unholy dumpster fire" I was half-expecting, but neither does it sound worth going out of my way to watch. So it fulfils the other half of my expectations, which is that it's corporate-mandated so-called "kiddie" boilerplate. And the insistence on continuity with FiM is basically the kiss of death, as far as I'm concerned, so long as I have my embargo with the later seasons. Yeah, I think I'll stick to my plans and give this thing a pass.
That said, I'm curious as to whether it makes more sense treating it as a standalone rather than as a "continuation".
5586824
Yeah, sounds about right. On its own, it's a fairly predictable and by the numbers kids' movie with some annoying songs and an aggressively unlikeable villain, but yes, the other characters are decent enough, and yes, there are certainly some interesting elements to it, so yeah, I see a glimmer of potential. I'd call it more mediocre than bad. It just so happens that mediocre is a massive improvement from where we were, so I think everyone's getting a skewed first impression of it, especially coming right off the hype train. But for what it's worth, I'm interested enough that I'll give the G5 series a try, and for once I'm actually expecting a new season of MLP to be better than the previous one, which is an odd feeling after so long.
A tentative "maybe." If the movie's plot were exactly the same in every way except that it had no connection whatsoever to G4, I'd bump it up from 6/10 to maybe a 6.5. There are a few plot holes caused by continuity issues, but honestly, most of the movie's writing problems are entirely its own. And considering that we still have the G5 series to come, it's difficult for me to even tell what's actually a plot hole and what's just not been answered yet. Like sure, we never find out in the movie how the day and night changes now without the alicorns around, or why the windigoes never came back, but that may just be because it's out of the movie's scope. Maybe it will be addressed in the upcoming G5 series? If we're taking past continuity into account, we should probably also be considering that G5 isn't a finished story yet, so I'll probably be filling out my bingo card again when the new show comes out.
Yeah, that's a fair summation. I went through a weird rollarcoaster with the film. I initially liked it because I thought the anti-hate message, while as subtle as a sledgehammer, was handled better than when Seasons 8 and 9 did it, and the characters were fun enough. Then I started to dislike it the more I thought about it, as I felt putting in Gen 4 was more of a hindrance than a benefit, which basically means the next installments either have to spend a lot of time uncovering what caused Equestria's downfall (which will distract from the main characters' stories) or just not address it all (which makes putting the setting in Gen 4 even more pointless).
I've kind of arrived at your position now, where I think the movie's more a piece of fluff that's entertaining enough to not get terribly mad at, but not good enough to gush over. I'd probably place it closer to a 4/10 just for some choices I really didn't like (most of the music, the inconsistent technology, gaps of logic in worldbuilding). Now we'll just have to see the media that comes after this will keep Gen 5 harmless fluff, great in its own right, or catastrophic trainwreak of unprecedented proportions.
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I dithered between giving it a 5 or a 6 myself. Maybe a 5.5? To be honest, this review is just a first impression as well. My opinion on the movie might change with reflection, or with the added context of the G5 series. But right now I don't have any particularly strong feelings on it, and the fandom are enjoying themselves, so I'm trying not to be overly negative, even if it means turning my brain off and lowering my standards. I did my venting already with the season reviews, and canon doesn't really matter to me anymore after the Haber seasons, so I don't have a horse in this race either way.
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Actually, since you bring this up, this is one part of the movie I'm undecided on, precisely because of that lack of subtlety. I appreciate that the movie feels a lot less cynical than the Haber seasons, because the ponies in G5 were only raised to be racist, but still chose friendship in the end, as opposed to the ponies of Equestria in season nine, who were raised on friendship, but then chose to be racists anyway. So the movie is a big improvement tonally.
But at the same time, everything the movie did with Sprout was so painfully transparent and lacking in any level of substance, and I hated every moment he was onscreen, because he was always either being evil or being an annoying snivelling coward. It's like the writers read my season eight review and saw all the ways I was praising Neighsay for being right about the friendship school, so they were like, "Okay! We won't make that mistake again! Our next villain needs to have absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever! The audience needs to know that he's bad, bad, BAD and that they should hate him!"
And maybe it's just me, but I like my villains to be like... characters, you know? Not just strawmen for the writer to knock down? That's why I liked Neighsay in the first place; because he was able to transcend the flimsy narrative around him and be an entertaining character anyway. But that's a feat that's way beyond the likes of Sprout, because there's nothing to him beyond being an avatar for the movie's message.
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Yeah, Sprout was one of the elements of the movie I liked on first watch, but have come to dislike as I really thought about it. I liked the idea of a pony villain who grows to evil through a poor upbringing, but there was never a point where he stopped being a wuss you could laugh at to a legitimate threat. Even once he becomes dictator, he is still falling over and acting like a clown. His plan is essentially building a killer zamboni to commit a race war, and even then he is crying to his mother nearly half the time he's in it. He's more childish than Cozy Glow, a literal child! It got to the point that I laughed during his musical number not so much because it was funny, but because it was so blatant and on-the-nose (literally screaming "MOB! MOB!" over and over) that you could feel the writers, as you said, practically screaming at the audience that this was the bad guy.
#NeighsayDidNothingWrong
But yeah, Sprout is just there to point out racism is bad, not to be an interesting character in his own right. Even the movie seems to want to forget about him, as the townsfolk don't even really punish him and his last scene is him impotently begging for approval from his mother. And not to toot my own horn, but I called it months ago, when the first information about the film came out, that a lot of the movie's problems would come from its focus on its moral messaging rather than telling a well-realized story. Sprout was one of the many examples of the film that I feel proves this theory out, and it's why the movie really falls flat in a lot of places for me.
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YES! Exactly!
The most annoying part is that it was one of the few songs that I actually liked the sound of, musically. Most of the rest of the soundtrack sounded like the same overproduced kids' pop garbage they had in the 2017 movie; I half expected Sia to start singing in some of those numbers. Sprout's song was actually an exception to that, and it's still stuck in my head now. But the lyrics just ruin it.
You know, it's funny, I used to think that Neighsay was right about everything in season eight except for the parts where he was being racist and telling Twilight that the non-ponies were a threat to Equestria, because obviously it's an allegory for real life racism, and I agree with the general message if not its execution. But then I realised that Equestria actually fucking collapsed after Twilight invited all the non-ponies in, and we cannot prove that the two events are unrelated.
Chalk up another win for Neighsay, I guess?
Well, it was a big part of what ruined seasons eight and nine, so it was a safe prediction, and we've now seen, an accurate one.
Hey, first-time commentator, but relatively long-time reviewer. Well, I got pointed to your Seasons 7-9 Review/Retrospective posts, anyway, and they helped clarify many reasons I couldn't articulate as to why they were so awful (on top of the ones I already had). Enough so that I now have my definitive take on them and have basically no need to ever revisit them again. So that's something!
Anyway, I wish I'd seen your review before taking over a week to form my own take, because again, we overlap a good bit. Not completely: I actually think the songs here are quite good (though I didn't feel that way the first time through, so maybe it's just an earworm effect), and though largely typical kids' pop they did jive with me. Perhaps it's also that they're narratively relevant and quick n' breezy, while the 2017 film's musical resume felt like an obligation and padded to take up more runtime, in the film and the songs themselves.
Perhaps that does explain partially the reaction around these parts. And given I too would much rather rewatch this then almost anything from Seasons 6-9 of G4, I'm not too different. It'll be interesting to see what the film's eventual fandom reception settles into with time, especially once the series arrives.
This probably has a lot to do with why I've since settled into broadly the same ranking as yourself. Even just thinking about the plotlines of S8/9 makes me sick, while though there are dark undercurrents here, they by no means overwhelm the main surface tone. It actually manages to be a feel-good entertainment - a clichéd one, but that still matters. This, I feel, is why despite the film being only okay, I still feel warmly about those aspects which I do like, which are quite a few. While even trying to think about things towards the end of G4 I liked doesn't work, they're eyeball-deep in sludge.
I mean, it is still a very fun-of-the-mill kids' movie, though thankfully the usual three-tiered comedy structure of toilet humour, innuendos and pop culture references is barely there. The comedy was actually quite decent - it helps the film doesn't go for belly-laughs, but keeps to mild chucklers and grinners, and the jokes are largely based in character. Outside of the social media influencer stuff (thankfully not too present) and the few focused references (that laboured Darth Vader breathing gag…), no groaners either. Which is a lot better than can be said for other similar kids' films these days.
But yes, an okay kids' film that I would have probably already forgotten if it wasn't Pony, and if I didn't have a personal bias in it being Ireland's first theatrical (intended) CG feature. Gotta root for the home troops.
On that note, perhaps the months of seeing the ponies on the internet helped me get used to their designs, because I thought that Boulder Media knocked it out of the park as far as the visuals went. There's no way this thing cost more than $20 million, so eschewing realism and some incredibly efficient asset management saved the day there - unlike modern Pixar/Disney/DreamWorks movies, they didn't build sets for short scenes, but used matte paintings. Do I wish the production design was more fantastical and imaginative? Yep, but the imagery is still energetic and soothing all at once. The ponies' faces do look off at certain angles and facial shapes, but no worse then any mid-budget (i.e. $60 million) CG film, and often less. Only major complaint there is giving Zipp narrowed eyes without adjusting her facial features to match, making her quite the Uncanny Valley home (though her dead-fish voice acting doesn't help matters there).
Amen to this, though I would not personally adjust my take on this movie's worldbuilding or continuity even if such issues get addressed later, because unlike, say, the first two episodes of G4, a movie is supposed to stand alone, especially if it's the first part of a franchise, and not a spin-off movie like four years ago. Not that we need to have everything answered - do we need to know how Maretime Bay or Zephyr Heights' financier work? Of course not. One just needs to have the relevant stuff answered, or at least feel implied to have a cohesion. Honestly, I would probably admire and enjoy the film's more tiny-self contained world akin to the Hundred Acre Wood if the story it was telling wasn't in complete opposition to that. Leaving a juxtaposition that never settles.
Won't argue with the film's problems mostly being rooted to the focus on its moral messaging rather then telling a story - overt message pictures are always risky, though since this one was still passably entertaining along the way, it fared better then most. Sprout is obviously a complete whiff of a character, clear evidence of not having time to retool him after scaling the film back from more overt, dark concepts and imagery (Maretime Bay was originally surrounded by a wall, and Sprout seemed to be the ruler and dictator of the town). Leaving us with a runt they tried to spin some threat level out of, but whom just comes across as a buffoon. I have come around to his song, just about the only thing he's involved in all film that works, but that's neither here nor there.
While I am mildly curious to see how the G5 show pans out, I didn't get any fandom interest from this film. The characters are kids' movie characters and are designed around that, which is perfectly fine (just means that they don't really establish workable foundations screaming for future stories)! Sunny, Izzy and Hitch are broadly likeable and enjoyable, though I found Zipp and Pipp to be failures and boring, if less objectionably so than Sprout. But even the film seems disinterested in the two pegasi, and unlike many people, I appreciate how the film priorities the characters that matter to the story. It's a film, not a 4-part episode, and should be treated as such.
The plot also foregrounds the more annoying and predictable elements, and the pacing gets a little too fast and eager once the action reaches Zephyr Heights (to that point, the film was quite enjoyable, actually). Not too badly, just enough that 7 more minutes in the film would have been nice. Or streamlining the plot and incident to give some breathing room back.
Going to wrap up there. Songs I like, animation I think is quite a success, typical but likeable leads (pegasi excepted), and decent comedy. Counterbalanced by rickety worldbuilding, a jerry-rigged story, the two pegasi and Sprout being whiffs, overt messaging that hamstrings the film, mildly fast pacing, and so on. On the whole, hard to feel anything but mixed about the whole affair. But those elements I like and treasure? They'll stick with me.
I should mention I'm far more of an animated film person then a tv show person, just so you know where my loyalties lie.
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This is a good comment. I'm glad to have someone breaking down the movie in a little more detail, since I wasn't really doing a proper review myself this time around, so thanks for this.
Always happy to help!
I'll certainly grant that the music is mostly better than the 2017 movie and felt less perfunctory than it did there, but I was still never able to get over the sound of it, or the on-the-nose lyrics in the case of Sprout's song. I fully admit that at least part of that is probably a bias towards the Daniel Ingram/Equestria Girls sound of G4, but what can I say? Musical taste is probably one of the most subjective things there is.
Is it really? I did not know that. That's cool, I guess.
Yeah, I also was not fond of Zipp's voice. It stands out significantly from the rest of the cast. All of the other characters sounded like they could've been teenagers or young adults something, and Izzy even sounds like an actual child at points, but Zipp just sounds like a forty-year-old woman to me. Which is especially odd because Zipp's voice actress is the youngest of the main cast. Maybe I was just mistaking lack of enthusiasm for age? I know I've certainly felt more drained and lifeless as I've gotten older.
Well, here's the tricky thing with ANG – it's both the first part of a franchise and it's a sequel at the same time. So we have two ways to look at it.
The first way is to treat the movie as a stand-alone experience, like you say, kicking off a new franchise for the uninitiated new viewers, in which case we shouldn't be considering plot holes like "where are the windigoes?" at all, because that's a franchise continuity world-building problem, entirely outside the scope of a stand-alone movie. The other way to look at it is as something that isn't stand-alone, as something which already exists in the context of an ongoing franchise. Then we can consider problems like the windigo question, but then we're not treating it as a stand-alone feature or the first movie of a franchise anymore; it's a sequel to G4, and a lead-in to G5. It looks like a new franchise, but in actuality, we should be thinking of it as something more like the second part of a trilogy.
SUBTLE.
Yeah, I noticed that too. I mean, my expectations going into this were rock bottom, and even I was expecting a stronger fandom response than this. That's what my bingo card about the feature box was about, because I always remember back in season six when Gauntlet of Fire first aired, and the mature feature box that week was literally nothing but dragon porn. Say what you will about that, but you can't deny that people were engaged back then.
Yet when this movie came out, the start of a whole new generation, with a whole load of unanswered questions and fanfic bait and a whole new cast of characters to work with... crickets, relatively speaking.
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Heh, cheers. It's a bit unfocused and muddled, but if you want more, there's a review of the film on my own blog. On top of what's here, it mostly goes into more detail fleshing out what I feel works and doesn't work about the various aspects.
It's weird when Hitch's VA, who is almost 50, and using his normal voice, sound far more energetic, youthful and lively. I can think of nothing else to add here other then pulling from my own review:
The line I have in mind there is her "Wow! A unicorn? And an earth pony? Together? Okay, well this day just got a whole lot more interesting." bit. A behind-the-scenes clip showed that this is FROM THE SAME TAKE, meaning she actively decided to fluctuate her voice. The effect with Zipp is like watching an ill-chosen voice in an anime dub, right down to losing any thread on the acting from the effort of the voice.
It's a pity, because outside of her and Pipp (who is just normal "flat", and with what the script requires her to do, that's no surprise - least she's not distractingly so!), the voice acting is decent, with Hitch and Izzy being proper good. What I found odd was how Sunny's voice acting delivery fluctuates all over the map, with the emotional and nuanced moments weirdly landing much better than the bouncy, upbeat and lively ones. Make of that what you will.
It proves that it takes far more than simply leaving unanswered question in media for people to want to start to write fanfic about it - the gaps have to be compelling and invite theory crafting without it even being an effort. One need only compare how much fan work the changelings got compared to how almost nothing came of the 2017 movie, some Tempest work excepted.
As for this film, it's telling that most of the limited fanfics around thus far are from people straining to force a G4->G5 connection, inventing the kind of headcanon with which one could paper over just about any plot hole in existence. We do know that these days, the fandom can only generate content from one piece of media for so long, so I expect to see this dry up long before we get more G5 media.
I think even if the continuity and worldbuilding of the end of G4 hadn't been such a train wreck that it makes perfect sense to cut and run from that altogether, I'd still much prefer to treat the film as, well, a film, not a 4-episode pilot for next year's show the way most viewers are. To quote my own review again:
Between both G4 and other Hasbro shows, their attempts to form large overarching continuities are largely a disaster, another reason why I'd much prefer a clean slate. But that is neither here nor there. This fandom has gotten so used to regular episodes that they can't see media in any other way. Then again, maybe it just speaks to my general preference for the structure of films over tv. But I think it's reasonable to want to treat something as what it is, rather than force it into the shape of something else. Besides which, the G5 show is going to be at least co-produced by a different studio (Atomic Cartoons in Canada), so it probably won't feel fully of the same space and place as this either anyway. Discounting how it will almost certainly, on the narrative level, be a light hearted slice-of-life show with much less of the continuity and worldbuilding teases G4 engaged us with so much.
Anyway, enough about that, don't want to delve into word vomit!
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Speaking of reviews, may I ask who directed you to my ones? I know stories get promoted by various means on this site, but the same isn't true of blogs, so I'm always curious when people who don't even follow me discover them.
Yeah, I see what you mean, and I had the same initial reaction. I dislike that line on many levels.
I mean, I would argue that ANG does have compelling gaps which don't require significant effort to fill. The question of how we get from the alleged utopia of Twilight's reign in the season nine finale to apparent post-apocalypse of G5 is probably the most interesting part of the entire movie to me, and I think anyone who was actually paying attention to how Twilight and the other characters behaved in seasons eight and nine wouldn't struggle to answer that question. Hell, even I've caught myself spitballing ideas for stories based around that, and I haven't written anything actually following canon since season six.
I think the real problem is simply that the fandom is just not as large anymore and not as engaged by canon as it used to be. Back when the changeling mania was going on, the fandom was young and still had lots of new and casual fans, but over time, a lot of those casual fans moved on. By the later seasons, only the most dedicated were still watching (and the occasional new fan like yourself drawn by the movie, though I think you'll agree you're a relative minority there). And in the intervening time, the show itself also changed, and we started seeing diminishing returns from the fandom. The further the show progressed, the less compelling gaps and fanfic bait it left. And the worse it got, the less people were interested in watching it or writing about it. Not to mention that even people who actually liked season nine might've seen it as a jumping off point, especially since the next show on the slate was Pony Life.
I think if the show had ended at, let's say, season five, and was immediately followed by ANG, completely unchanged from how it is now... well, I don't know how it would've been received, but I think we would've seen a lot more fandom engagement from it. It'd be at least as big as Equestria Girls was. I think the lack of response speaks more to the fandom's fatigue after the Haber seasons than it does to any intrinsic fault of the movie. Like how Solo underperformed because people were pissed off after Last Jedi.
I'd prefer a clean slate as well, but given that they specifically chose to make G5 a continuation of G4 to draw in the older fans, I don't think we're getting that.
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Impossible Numbers pointed me your way round the year's start. I never commented at the time because I find commenting difficult at times, and didn't have anything to add in any case to the novel you'd devoted to the project. I had already read some of your fics before (okay, "Just Dodge!"), but had no idea you'd done those blogs until I was directly told about them. And good thing I was! Never gonna read them again after doing so twice, very depressing, but super glad I did.
Heh, forget the awful delivery - even just from a writing perspective, it's a stinker of a "trailer line" if ever there was one. Apart from anything else, a statement like things becoming more interesting only works if we've SEEN what said day has been like for said character thus far.
Oh, very much so, and I say this as someone who's only been around Fimfiction since early 2018.
Well, no, but I think the G4 connecting elements will remain minor and in the background going forward, so if one wants to ignore them, they mostly can.
Either way, I can say with certainly that G5 isn't going to produce enough of a cultural or fandom cachet for Hasbro to feel the need to connect this generation to the next one to retain viewers. So when the inevitable G6 rolls around whenever, it will be a clean slate.
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Ah, I should've guessed! Numbers is a good lad. He was probably my most prolific commenter on those reviews, and he and I had a lot of in-depth discussions about the many, many failings of the final seasons.
I feel that.
Absolutely, and I hate that. I always remember Batman V Superman as having an egregious case of this, since it felt like almost every line out of Jesse Eisenberg's mouth was for the trailer. I even had a joke to that effect in my parody of it.
Incidentally, that trailer in general, and Zipp's line in particular, was a big part of why my expectations for the movie were so low in the first place.
I'm not saying I think the show will revolve around them, but I definitely think they'll be more in the foreground than they were in the movie, now that they've gotten their generic kids' movie plot out of the way and finished setting up their world and characters. It's like you said, a movie needs to be able to stand alone, but once they start the TV show, they'll have a lot more creative freedom to indulge in fanservice, and there's not really much reason to keep continuity with G4 unless you intend to do that. I mean, they already teased the mane six in the first five minutes of the movie, even though they had literally nothing to do with the plot, so I'd be extremely surprised if we got through G5 without at least one immortal G4 character appearing in person and doing something important.
Agreed there.
It wasn't great, was it? Then again, modern animated movie trailers rarely are, catering to hyper kids, their parents, and other people with short attention spans who can only see things as a bit of a lark. After a while, one learns to read between the lines, though with that trailer, it was so stuffed with the stench of being hip and relevant to today's youth that it proved unpleasant. Thankfully that feeling was far less pronounced in the film itself.
You're probably right that there will be at least a little more. But I think it's clear Hasbro wants this to be mostly for new kids and their parents who have never seen G4. That's the nature of kids' shows aimed this young, they're cyclic and reset every few years. FiM only lasted as long as it did because Hasbro didn't know how to respond to its success and adult fandom, and kept renewing it while they worked to make MLP a permanent evergreen property much like Transformers, which is complete now. Regardless of how the actual artists and writers feel, Hasbro included the G4 connection mostly as Brony baiting.
We may get more direct discussion and nods of G4 in the new show - we probably will - but I think it will be in a vague, cryptic way that stays away from detail enough so as to not feel "hey, you need to go watch the old show" to new viewers. And I honestly do not see old G4 characters making any actual appearances whatsoever. Not present-day, in-the-flesh ones, anyway.
I could be wrong. But this is how I'm reading it. We can only theorise for now, and I don't feel the need to do any more until it comes.
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I don't think Hasbro cares one way or another about the continuity. I think their only vested interest in the actual story of G5 is in making sure that it remains age appropriate, on-brand, and that it appeals to as wide an audience as possible, the already existing fans included. How much pandering or fanservice is included is very much up to the writers, and it was a writer decision to keep it in-continuity in the first place, so I'm inclined to believe that the writers have a reason for that.
But hey, whatever. Maybe I'm right, maybe you're right. We'll see when we see.
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Was it?
First I've heard of that - all I've seen of the leaks over the years (especially in 2017, when Hasbro was toying with soft or hard reboot, and this was before Boulder Media came onboard to produce the film), and the behind-the-scenes info shared by the artists for this film, very much point towards the opposite, of it being a corporate-originating idea (the filmmakers embraced doing all the Easter eggs and nods for sure, and will probably do the same in the G5 series, but that's not quite the same thing). All we have to go on is that corporate press release back in February, and that seems to point towards it being Hasbro, not the writers.
But I suppose you can rarely take what companies and corporations say at face value, can you? We'll see.
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Admittedly this is speculation on my part from the leaked emails, where I very much got the impression that Meghan McCarthy was the one with creative control, and she was just trying to wrangle everyone else into reaching a consensus on what exactly they wanted to do with the world (and making it a G4 sequel is a reasonable consensus to eventually reach). And yeah, corporate press releases would probably tend to credit the corporation, not the long-suffering individual writers. But I haven't researched that deeply into the production of G5 because it's not something I care that much about, so you probably know more than me on this front. If any actual writers at any point said or implied that the decision to keep continuity with G4 came from above, then it probably did. I would find it very strange if that were the case, but I'm not gonna argue if you know something I don't.
But on the other hand, if it wasn't a writer decision, and Hasbro were the ones demanding that they keep continuity, then that sounds to me like all the more reason to expect pandering and fanservice, because now the writers would be doubly motivated to include it.